I don’t think about the telephone. It isn’t that I dislike phone conversations per se, it is just that the “phone” is a part of my life … similar to my arm or spleen. When was the last time you thought about your spleen? You don’t unless it is broken.

This isn’t quite true … I did think about “phones” when I upgraded my cell phone to a PDA-Cellphone combo, but this isn’t my point.

My wife gave me a book for Father’s Day entitled Tolstoy’s Dictaphone: Technology and the Muse which is a collection of essays on the subject of technology’s influence on the common man. Well, when we say “common man” in this case, we really mean “writers and authors” because that is who is writing the articles.

Reminds me of a Firesign Theater quote where they talk of movies of common, every-day humans as portrayed by rich, Hollywood stars. But once again, I digress.

There was an interesting quote by Lynne Sharon Schwartz in an article that talks about the place a “phone” occupies in our relationships.

In the world of business there are no interruptions. Or rather, interruptions means business— action, transaction, goods and money flowing. A business with silent phones is on the path to doom. So with our lives; we want the phone to ring. It means we have a life, we’re in business.

I like that … I don’t necessarily agree with it. If my phone never rang, I’m not sure I would notice. I just love face-to-face conversations at a noisy table in a crowded restaurant. I’m not sure I could even have a relationship with someone purely through the phone.

Well, maybe that’s not entirely true. Of necessity, I have a couple of friends and family members that I can only talk with over the phone as they live too far away. But that’s not my preference. Still, there is another quote in this article that I found clever:

With certain friends who live too far away for a visit, we talk so well and so thoroughly on the phone that we don’t ever long to see them. If they do hit town periodically, we feel a discrepancy, a slight jolt when we meet. We’re so accustomed to the unfleshed voice that we have trouble compounding and compacting it with the body it issues from. By the time our neural circuits have wedded the voice and the body so we can speak as naturally as on the phone, the visit may be over, the critical moment passed. We part looking forward to the next phone call; we go home unsatisfied, as if we haven’t really enjoyed the friend we know so well. Something was missing. What was missing was the physical absence, the fertile vacuum in which our friendship blooms, a vacuum that bathes our words in its delicate emptiness and suffuses them with a pure, floating grace.

So while this quote intrigues me, I can’t say that I’ve ever experienced it. I have trouble with long-distance relationships in general, and have never gone past using the phone for anything other than “business” …