I sit at dinner, letting my fingertips slide across the pages of a book. Voices, laughter, forks against plates; each sound echoes in the room, melting into one another until they become large, meaningless noise. The faces around me are chiseled with exhaustion. And I would tell about their eyes except I can’t see them. Instead of those beautiful mirrors of emotion and light, I see screens, the backs of phone cases, vacant eyes to replace the living ones. Each lull in conversation forces hands back to screens. Every pause reawakens this wall of technology.

In The Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot described this world of vacant eyes:

“Neither plentitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker

Over the strained time-ridden faces

Distracted from distraction by distraction

Filled with fancies and empty of meaning

Tumid apathy with no concentration…

Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.”

I cannot and will not try to pretend that I have ever been able to fully grasp any line by T.S. Eliot. I do know, however, that he had a gift for seeing the world in all its brokenness.

“Distracted from distraction by distraction”

This world is brimming with lovers of distraction. I count myself among the guilty. We hate the sound of our own heartbeats, our thoughts, our breath. Instead, we wait for the buzz of our phones and the little red number in the corner of Snapchat. We lament our busyness, tell the world how tired we are, and then we seek out more distraction, more events to keep us busy. We admire the man who is constantly on his feet. Anything but pause. Anything but silence. Anything but stillness.

“Tumid apathy with no concentration”

We are bloated with apathy and a passionless existence. We have begun to find pride in not caring. Apathy has become attractive. It takes courage to overcome the laziness and be passionate in an uncaring world. Concentration and focus are foreign to our lives. Our minds bounce from screen to homework to friends to complaint to screen with no real direction. We have no passion and, as a result, we no longer know where we are meant to go. We have forgotten the why of life and have become content with the what.

“This twittering world”

We have become birds, twittering away our lives, only skimming the surface of reality. We talk of trivial things because we are afraid. We are afraid of revealing the secret parts of our soul and the stains of our personhood. A friend of mine once wrote that one of the ways to the soul is through the eyes. In our attempt to hide ourselves, we grasp screens, a word which originally meant “anything that shelters, protects, or conceals.” Whether or not this is what the word was meant to suggest, we nevertheless have used screens to hide our living eyes in order to conceal, shelter and protect our souls. Even while we sit right beside other human beings, we grab screens to keep us from depth and insecurity. We use the twittering of our phones to keep out the silence.

A note before I close: I do not hate technology. I love it actually. But I believe that phones should be used to draw us deeper to one another, not put up walls. Use them to talk to distant friends and far off relatives. Use them to look up words and discover new things. Use them to stop getting lost. But do not use them to run away from the physical, here-and-now conversations. Start looking into the eyes of others and don’t be afraid to show your soul to the world. Stop twittering and start talking.