C.S. Lewis on "Death of Distance" & Social Media's Asocial Society

Ahoy from Amoy!  (historic Xiamen, China). In C.S. Lewis' autobiographical "Surprised by Joy," he wrote a remarkable passage about why he was so happy, during childhood, that his father had no car, because modern transportation destroyed distance, and with it, mystery and adventure. Just imagine how he'd have reacted to the changes we've witnessed even during our brief 3 decades in Xiamen, Fujian Province.

When we arrived in Xiamen in 1988, I carted my family about on a heavy iron and wooden pedicab, and the trains were smoke--belching locomotives you'd have seen a century ago in America, and in 1993, it took me 35 hours of driving (not including rest)  to reach Wuyi Mountain in the Northwest of our Fujian province. Today, I can drive it in 6 hours or take a 3-hour bullet train. Fast, convenient, but not near as exciting as 25 years ago, when travel was an adventure and we actually experienced the places and peoples we passed. It has been said the journey is more important than the destination but we no longer journey--especially with social media, where everyone is always "here," staring at me from a screen." And rather than relationships we have facades; we're online avatars with a different face for each social occasion, and more trolls than Middle Earth.

If Lewis decried the annihilation of space, what would we have thought of social media's asocial society? After reading Lewis' brief passage below, join me in shutting off your phones and computers for at least one day a week and going for a leisurely walk to enjoy this brief Gift of Time that our Father has sliced from Eternity. Cease thoughts of There and Then and savor the gift of Here and Now.

C.S. Lewis' on The Annihilation of Space.

"I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon.

"The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distances by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed "infinite riches" in what would have been to motorists "a little room." 

"The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it "annihilates space." It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten.

"Of course if a man hates apace and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there."

Enjoy Amoy!

Dr. Bill

School of Management, Xiamen University
Amazon eBook "Discover Xiamen"

www.amoymagic.com

Bill Brown Xiamen University www.amoymagic.com