Snap Crackle Pop

Interstate thirty-five doing eighty in an Audi A6, alright? You’re zipping north from San Antonio with a Dr. Pepper, tater tots, and instructions to keep the car immaculate. Sister is driving and you fidget shotgun. Together you giggle at a billboard prophesying the 2027 Apocalypse but for the most part it’s a dull dead shot to downtown Dallas. A periodic highway sign reads, “2214 Deaths on Texas Roads This Year.” You think: since January, how often is that? Do most of them occur on weekends? Will the number rise before we hit land? Two thousand two hundred and fourteen. Two two one four. Twenty two. Fourteen.

But right now you’re concerned with finding an iPod auxiliary port because that “Graceland” CD can only get so much mileage. It must be here somewhere; don’t tell me I have to hook up Bluetooth! Well maybe this button does—no, that opens the glove compartment. How about this—no, now my seat is reclining. You wonder if another one will eject you through the sunroof or sprout wings from the passenger doors. This 400-page owner’s manual is no help. But here’s another button—an inconspicuous bubble on the center panel by the cupholders. It says “P.” P for “Push Me!” So you push. And your speed drops in half. And an object in motion tends to stay in motion. And you don’t understand what’s happening and your car flips. And the tally rises: Fifteen. Sixteen.

Fortunately the parking brake was as easy to release as it was to engage: the alternate tragedy stays backstage. You press forward, baffled and insecure. “David let’s you not touch anything else in the car, OK?” Between the water towers of Waxahachie and Waco, I recover my nerves and become newly enraged. The parking brake should not be a subtle device! Its operation should be deliberately mechanical. But this is the way of so much else in the modern automobile—you flip a switch to lower the window or push an oversized button to start the engine. Google is experimenting now with a driverless car and the U.S. is making waves with its UAVs. The adrenaline subsides and my heart resumes its regular subdued rhythm on the road toward dusty Denton. The passing billboard for a jeweler pairs a diamond ring with the text: “Update her status.”

“These are the days of miracle and wonder,” so says Paul Simon. We have more than 7 billion people on earth and all the less space for each individual to strut and fret his hour. Here now are marvelous innovations and new extraordinary ways of failing; with cash I had to account for every bill, but with credit I can sign, swipe, and sprint to inconceivable debts. Our world is circumscribed in discreet gestures and tiny swipes of the index finger. By twitches of the eye and face, Stephen Hawking continues to articulate our universe.

During my sophomore spring I sat in the crowded back row of Dunster d-hall to watch an outstanding new student-produced translation of Mozart’s 1786 opera, “Le Nozze Di Figaro.” In the opening scene, we witness Figaro incrementally measuring space for his wedding bed: “Five...Ten...” he counts off with obvious pleasure. In the audience, a videographer struggles to wordlessly explain that he is filming the show, so please do not walk in front of the camera. He finally makes his point clear by pantomiming the cranking of an old-fashioned video camera like Carl Denham filming “King Kong.” I think of other descriptive gestures that refer to obsolete technology: the “pull-down” motion to ask a truck driver to blow his horn, or the “rolling” signal to have someone lower their window. Actions that closely resemble their referent—visual onomotopoeia. Meanwhile the servant protagonist continues: Twenty. Thirty.

There is an elemental satisfaction in negotiating the materiality of your world. It gives you a feeling of action and consequence, control and agency. It is perhaps the very reason why I still print my readings at Lamont or play “Guitar Hero” over “Call of Duty” at most opportunities. To quote da Ponte’s libretto—“il chitarrino le suonerò.” Yes! There is likewise a battle between the luxury of doing nothing for yourself—like a 19th century Russian aristocrat from "Anna Karenina" who wears fancy cufflinks and long yellow fingernails—and the respect of doing real “work”: force over distance. That Bob Dylan could betray folk music with his electric guitar. That Skrillex could possibly put on a concert with just a Macbook Pro. We feel cheated when output is disproportionate to input, and in some ways we are.

I am no opponent of progress. I am interested in how the past informs the present on the rocky road of development. Our intelligent touchscreen keyboards still use the same QWERTY format that originated with the need to avoid typewriter jams. It’s like when you finally arrive at that wedding in Dallas and admire the post-ceremony line-dancing. Men and women shuffle forward, backwards, side-to-side, a ninety-degree turn and repeat. Heel, toe, dosey do, come on baby let’s go. Here’s the give and take as I see it now in early October. Twenty. Thirteen.

—Columnist David Grieder can be reached at davidgrieder@college.harvard.edu.