Farther Away : Essays

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Good morning, Class of 2011. Good morning, relatives and faculty. It’s a great honor and pleasure to be here today.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that you all knew what you were getting into when you chose a literary writer to deliver this address. I’m going to do what literary writers do, which is to talk about themselves, in the hope that my experience has some resonance with your own. I’d like to work my way around to the subject of love and its relation to my life and to the strange technocapitalist world that you guys are inheriting.

A couple of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold, with a five-megapixel camera and 3G capability. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its tiny track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics. I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues, and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.

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