After the Storm, This Evening

A full day of rain and surprisingly cold high winds after our recent sunny days--but the early evening clearing was worth the wait.

Late Night Row on the Grand Canal

One of the few periods when motor boat (especially water taxi) traffic is not overwhelming

A Lion Among the Wisteria, This Afternoon

April Quotidian, This Afternoon

An Artist of the Floating World

A Window Seat on the Grand Canal, Today

Anywhere But Here

A screen can prove irresistible even while being rowed across the Grand Canal...

I'm aware that some people--maybe even the majority--visit blogs like this one because it's a chance to catch up on a place they'd like to be but aren't. It's certainly one of the things that led me to blogs on Venice before we actually lived here. And the thought of this gives me pause when I find myself reading a book or an e-book on a vaporetto as it passes by, say, the Doges' Palace and Piazza San Marco and Santa Maria della Salute and all the other sights I myself once longed to behold in person when I was in fact far away from them. I know that we get used to any- and everything. But should we?

Consider the image above. Let's assume the person standing in the center of the Santa Sophia traghetto in the slightly hunched screen-focused posture that defines our times is in the midst of her commute to or from work, in which the short passage across the Grand Canal is a link. Commuters everywhere take refuge in their screens, just as they previously took refuge in the printed page of newspapers, magazines, or books. And yet to spend the mere 30 seconds or so it takes to be rowed across one of the world's most famous and picturesque waterways/avenues focused on a small screen seems like a bad idea to me. 

Perhaps in this case it was some pressing matter that couldn't be delayed even half a minute. Okay. But in my own case I marvel at how the definition of "pressing" and "imperative" has expanded when it comes to screens--and I don't even have a smart phone.

And I wonder about how dramatically the constant temptation of screens, which lure us with the promise of information in "real time" or "as it happens"--something newspapers could never do--have destroyed our sense of place.

"How do you like your new apartment?" I'm asked, and though I can answer in any number of ways I'm not sure I can feel the experience of this very particular place as I once could. I trust, or hope, that I just need more time in it and that it will come.

But at the risk of stating the obvious, how different it feels to live in Venice now than it did 25 years ago. Not just because of the way Venice has changed but because of the way technology has changed our sense of place. Or maybe it's only mine.

25 years ago Venice was much more distant from the life I'd left behind in the US. And it was a much less clamorous place--not objectively, acoustically, but, well, inside my own head.

I'm afraid this threatens to turn into a long dull post--Paul Valéry, WD Howells, the French theorist Paul Virilio,* and a host of others are hovering allusively around its yet unwritten edges, and I think it best to keep them out. But isn't it odd that we pay so much to travel to distant places and then spend much of our time worrying about wi-fi access to keep us in touch with the place we've just left--and a thousand other places besides?

"To be everywhere is to be nowhere," Seneca warned in a line that took on new meaning with the coming of the internet. And to be everywhere at once never seemed especially satisfying even for the Almighty Himself; that Great Being defined by His ubiquity who, like the earliest recorded adapter of Facebook, seemed in frequent if not constant need of attention, praise and adoration.

...or on the outside seats at the back of a vaporetto

Note: * "In the opening section of The Lost Dimension [published in France way back in 1984], Virilio sets up his polemic about the 'disappearance' and 'loss' of architectonic dimension. The screen [film, tv or early computer] is an 'interface' which relies on a 'visibility without any face-to-face encounter, in which the vis-a-vis of the ancient streets disappears and is erased.' The polis, agora and forum have been replaced by the screen. ... Virilio writes: 'With the interfacing of computer terminals and video monitors, distinctions of here and there no longer mean anything.'" 
                                                            --From a 2004 essay on Virilio by Anne Friedberg