A window on the world

For a world that is supposedly without borders, boundaries, or limits thanks to technology, I wonder if we are not the most myopic generation in the history of the world, assuming we know and understand things far away in time or space or both because we can google it in a heart beat, but in truth we know nothing, least of all ourselves.  But there is a cure: read.  Yes, that old fashioned, outdated, archaic activity is not reserved for spinsters of the Jane Austen period (you know, pre-1995), it does indeed have its uses.  We google things, glance through a short paragraph or a few words, and deem ourselves experts on any given topic, when our forebears (including our pre-google selves) used to pick up a book and actually get familiar with the topic, and through stories, we could actually live through the French Revolution or the travels of Odysseus.

But nowadays, our worldview is more narrow than ever.  We hem ourselves in with our favorite bands, songs, quotes, movies, TV shows, and talk to no one but those who agree with us in taste and opinion, even our media consumption is strictly that which makes us comfortable, calling everyone who disagrees even slightly an idiot or a bigot or a fiend of the worst sort.  We have this safe, fake cocoon to protect us from real understanding, empathy, kindness, and thought and we like it that way.   It isn't messy, uncomfortable, or challenging, it is safe, calm, and unexciting; it is beige.  Yes, beige, that offensively dull and ubiquitous color with no life or personality or meaning that goes with everything but nobody likes.  It is the color of suburban houses and apartment carpets and cubical walls.

Yet we all want authenticity, we want 'all natural,' we want 'free range,' we want adventure and love and romance, yet none of that is summed up in the color or lifestyle choice known as beige.  Beige does not exist in the natural world, at least in vast quantities, it may be a grain of sand here or a feather there, but I dare you to find an entire expanse of humdrum beige.  Find the brownest bird and look closely at his feathers, they are a riot of fawn, mahogany, sable, white, tan and a thousand hues not beige.  Or a sandy beach, look at the little grains, each a different color, no two alike in shape or texture or hue.  There is black or white or blue, but not beige.  How horrid a world that boasts a beige sky!  Ours is a wild, wondrous, shifting blue from deepest twilight to a pallid color that is almost but not quite white.

Open a book, preferably an old book, and go have an adventure.  Go raft down the Mississippi or rot in a French prison or dare the seas of yore.  Chase yourself a rich husband or slay a dragon.  Learn about people, places, and events strange to modern and politically correct sensibilities; peer through those strange casements upon 'fairy lands forlorn.'  Get off social media, turn off the tele, pocket your phone.  Adventure awaits, and even if the cover is tattered and sadly beige, there's many a long dead sage that has far more to say than anyone on Twitter!