Artificial

 I don't know if it happens only to me or to everyone who, through civilization, has been born a second time. But for me, and perhaps for other people like me, it seems that what's artificial has become natural, and what's natural is now strange. Or rather, it's not that what's artificial has become natural; it's simply that what's natural has changed. I have no use for motor vehicles. I have no use for the products of science - telephones, telegraphs - which make life easy, not for its fanciful by-products - phonographs, radios - which make life amusing for those who are amused by such things.

None of that interests me, none of it appeals. But I love the Tagus because of the big city along its shore.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 50

This week is my COR 204 class I lined up Craig Gillespie's wonderful film Lars and the Real Girl, a brief discussion of Karl Marx's ideas of alienation and reification, and readings like this from Pessoa. The students, at least in my Monday class, stared vapidly at me and went back to looking at their phones. At that moment I could only reflect, "Thank you for proving Marx and Pessoa correct, and for putting an exclamation mark on this evening's lesson plan."

On a happier note, I'll be returning to that big city on the banks of the Tagus in June to present at a conference.