I went out today without a telephone

I hadn't meant to be gone for more than a moment. I didn't even take a jacket, and my shirtsleeves stayed rolled up. It was virtually spring-like today in the Piedmont: gentle and almost fragrant. But this was also Sunday, when one enjoys a little negligence. (Boyhood's games were somewhat more than usually raucous, for this reason, after compulsory worship in itchy pants). Glancing at where the telephone always perches by its charger in the car, I saw that I was without it. I hadn't felt this breath of childhood liberty so self-consciously, ever before. And yet I recognised it instantly for what it is: a natural precondition of one's happiness.

It had nothing to do with good or bad, and everything with being accessible in a very different way, to what one can sense of the world. I learned what I'd always known: I dislike these things. Oh, not the old, stationary lines. I dislike how networks keep the young I know, on strings, for all their ostentatious effic-iency; and I found only today, they do the same to me, elbowing me a hundred times a day as some very incontinent servant. Their demand to be glanced at is quite repugnant to me, and I won't live with them. I think this is fundamental; they are the new Cross, and one is more than enough.

For the same reason, I'll be blogging much less frequently, but not so seldom that any continent reader will notice. I dislike the pseudonymity I'm compelled to adopt at this page, a distorting swap of one artifice for another. Yet merely to produce this slight testament, adopting even this puerile channel, one cannot but see this as unnatural space. 


I am descended from a man who got his ink on people's fingers, because he was himself. This is a false page, but it can host a true thing, if one keeps it as indifferent as paper.








Mathias Lauridsen