For my birthday
this year my wife gave me a fancy new digital camera, a
product of the technological age that gets such a bad press
from most progressives, who would prefer we all move back
to a simpler, cleaner and, they usually fail to mention,
poorer era.
I suspect they would argue that in the new global order
they have in mind they’d keep all the good things,
like amazing digital cameras, and just get rid of the bad
things, like combustion engines. The obvious and obviously
correct response of economists to such thinking is perfectly
ecological: Everything is connected. You probably can’t
have the digital camera without the combustion engine. And
if lots of people are busy growing food the old-fashioned,
expensive way, they aren’t going to be available for
research into how to make even more amazing pictures.
Anyway, the camera arrived during hockey season so the first
pictures I took were of my kids playing hockey. And I did
take pictures! With no constraint imposed by film you can
take hundreds of exposures per hockey game, which is exactly
what I did. (My older son accuses me of jamming our hard
drive so full of pictures that the family computer freezes
much more often than it used to. I suspect how much is on
the hard drive has nothing to do with that but am not technological
enough to assert this with convincing enough authority.)
As the hockey season wound down, along came spring and its
first buds. I’d noticed that my camera has a special
close-up “macro,” the control designated by
the figure of a flower, so I thought I’d try it out
on one of the flowers coming up near our front steps. The
results were so spectacular — to my eye, at least:
I hope they reproduce as well on your screen — that
I’ve kept on taking pictures of flowers.
My wife and sons think I’ve gone nuts. During the
time the purple flower you see here was blooming —
I do intend eventually to learn the names of the varieties
I’ve been shooting — I was sneaking outside
every few hours to check on its progress. Somehow I had
arrived in my mid-fifties without fully realizing that a
flower blooms when the thin green sheath that stores its
petals gradually dries out and disappears. It’s quite
amazing, really. I’m now taking pictures of all sorts
of flowers — and stone gardens and sand boxes and
trees and the sun through the trees and so on — and
making a visual record of our surroundings, which I now
see with, if not quite new eyes, then certainly new appreciation.
“Take time to stop and shoot the flowers,” is
my new watchword.
None of this would have happened without advanced technology
made available by 21st-century capitalism. Consumption is
widely derided and decried. Some consumption clearly is
mindless: that is its purpose. But my mindful consumption
of my new camera has brought me closer to the simple, natural
things anti-technologists fear we will lose. I suppose it’s
possible that if we went their preferred route, then after
a long day behind an ox and plough I might collapse exhausted
to the ground and, just before passing into unconsciousness,
notice the beauty of the flowers coming into bloom. But
I prefer my way of both consuming beauty and appreciating
the beauty of consumption. |
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