What is Real?

Okay, so it's my father, but he writes great stuff. Here's his article on Labor Day.

Apropos of that - and note, please, that I am using the term correctly - when I was in the tech industry and my father was doing an affinity-marketing thing on the web on the east coast, we had a conversation about whether anything we were doing was real. By real we meant that it would continue, even for a day, if EMP destroyed the world's computer infrastructure. We concluded that we weren't, and that bothered me a lot.

I then read an article talking about The Discarded Image, and the conflict that led to the Bonfire of the Vanities and other reactions to the encroachment of escapist literature and art into the real world. I happen to be a fellow that thinks that great art and literature help us to see the real world more clearly, but that's not the point of this post. The point is that increasingly we live in a world that is lit by fluorescents, heard in .mp3 files, and seen through the 19" of a Sony, and that none of those things is real.

That was when I stopped being a man, and became a Hobbit. And like all Hobbits, I share a love of things that grow. I lost most of my use for power and money and glory and the trappings and neon of the world in America (and other places), and discovered - remembered, perhaps - that there is nothing so beautiful as a row of jambalaya peppers ripening in the sun and my family in the earth, weeding and caring for them.

Gordon's article about the real labor of Labor Day hits on a similar theme.

Of course, I blog about this. Irony, above all.

Chris Jones

Resident Magician

The Chris Jones Group