JUNE 6, TUESDAY

MY SHRINKING WONDERLAND

In Alice in Wonderland Alice is suddenly in a world where everything has shrunken down and she is enormous. When she stands up her head hits the ceiling. She is completely dislocated. I am beginning to have this feeling also because I have the sensation that I live in a world in which everything is shrinking, even the world itself is shrinking. And it has happened in my lifetime.

I‘ve mentioned before how the world has shrunk. When I was a child of missionaries in India it took so long to get to India and back that missionaries only returned home to visit family every seven years. The passage to India required ten days or more to cross the Atlantic by steamer, then another two weeks to go from Southhampton, England, to Bombay by steamer. And of course before the Suez Canal the trip around Africa took months. Now India is twenty hours away, an overnight flight. The distance hasn‘t changed but the Alice in Wonderland apparent size of the world has.

And of course the same is true of communication. In the 1950’s the news could go by telegraph fairly quickly, but in a condensed version. Now, over the Internet, and soon in 3D we can be in two places at once, walking down the street in Bombay and sitting at home in Swannanoa.

And of course that same shrinking is why manufacturing shifted from the USA to China. An Apple computer can be ordered from China where it sits on a shelf and be here in three days. The world has shrunk. The war in Ukraine could just as well be next door, we can see instantly what is going on there, feel the cold water up to our waits in the day after the dam breaks.

But it is another form of shrinking that has slowly become apparent to me.

Across my living room is a flat 40 inch tv screen that is enormous compared to the 9“ screen of our first family tv in the late 50‘s. But I don‘t look at it. Instead I watch TV, when I watch it, on the 12“ iPad three feet in front of me. The iPad is every bit as sharp as the larger TV and the screen, by being closer, seems just bigger. And then on Monday the Apple Vision Pro goggles were being introduced. And what I have realized as I dream of those goggles, is that the goggles have moved the screen only an inch from my eyes, and that wrap around screen has become, according to the few reviewers who go to try it, a giant hundred foot screen towering above me.

The Apple Vision Pro will bring the whole world one inch away and let me, through virtual 3D technology, be anywhere on earth.

In my living room I take up very little space. But because of shrinking technology, I have become a hulking Alice is in Wonderland figure.

I‘ll try looking at this from a different perspective, one that has been dawning on me for the last couple of years especially.

As I have started to travel two years ago for a month or two every few months to a distant place, it has become clearer and clearer how little I have to carry with me to feel completely comfortable. All I need is a couple of changes of clothes, my medicines, a toothbrush, and my digital equipment. Everything I need for a month or two, or probably 6 months, I can take in a carryon bag. And anywhere in the world that I want to visit I can get to in an overnight plane ride. Time has shrunk, distance has shrunk, what I need has shrunk. The only thing that hasn‘t shrunk is me, and I have recently expanded a little. So I am going to think about this and puzzle about it some more tomorrow.