The Wonderful World Of Marvin Minsky



This give me pause.

We had a place to talk that belonged just to us. At the end of the field above the houses, there was a beat-up old gate that led to a rutted path across the common to the remotest farms of the village. The path at the gate was deeply cut through much use, but today was dry enough for us to walk on. We stood on the second rung up with the line of the hills stretching across the horizon. It was always quiet here for we were far enough away from any roads to shrink the traffic noise to a gentle challenge to the almost-silent noises of the country around. This is what most of England sounds like I suppose but not to most Englanders; they live in a mess of city noise, cacophonies of muzak and the merged roar of millions of cars, a permanent tinnitus that does not even give us respite at night. These days I wake to the strange scrapes and clangs of wind blowing anything loose against anything solid. mixed with distant sirens, the clatter of helicopters and the mysterious detonations that come from docks and freight yards. I imagine the rain falling on everything like it did in the country but it all still makes all this noise, wasting energy and making our lives somehow less important. People used to mean something in the landscape but now they are just small things against the massive backdrops of architecture. We wake to electronics rather than the sun and go against all our programming, forcing ourselves to work for defined times rather than when is good for us.