The Little Guy in the Phone

Imagine a slightly different version of the film Titanic, where the centenarian Rose dies after a long, rich existence. During the lifetime that followed the eponymous ship's fatal voyage, Rose has seen it all. So when she gets to that well-appointed ballroom in the afterlife, and Jack is waiting there for her, she is at first confused. She looks around for a minute until finally there’s a flash of recognition. 

“Oh, you’re that guy from the boat.” 

For Jack, their four-day fling occurred during the last and most climactic moments of his life. But Rose went on to live through both World Wars and the moon landing. It could be that the shipwreck she survived when she was a teenager had worked its way down on her list over the course of the latter eight decades of her life. 

Jack’s twenty short years on this earth were simply not long enough to learn one of the Big Lessons: How people are when they are with you is far less indicative of how they feel about you than how they are when you are not present. 

Without getting too specific, I’ve long been tangentially involved with a group of older folks who knew John Lennon. A few times a year, they come together to drink, eat, and play music. These gatherings can be fun, but the melancholy comes out when you realize just what a weekend of partying with a Beatle fifty years ago did to them. Talking to some of these folks, you may get the sense that a dense gravitational field arose around a moment that, for Lennon, could have been like any other.

These are rather extreme examples of a phenomenon that remains observable even when the parties are not separated by vast expanses of time or the firmament between life and death.

Ask yourself: how many times have you gladhanded someone who you couldn’t stand? How many times have you dished out a “yeah, hit me up, let’s grab a drink soon” to someone you would never mourn?  And how many times have you been on the other side of this? We are all Jack and Rose, the Lennon to a cadre of orbiters. 

Now that we have the cell phone, the line between presence and lack thereof has become all smudgy. Maybe someone calling or texting you is precisely the kind of behavior I’m talking about when I say “how they are when you are not present.” But when we make ourselves so generally available, aren’t we sort of always with each other? If a conversation that happens across the table is unambiguously an act of presence, what then is conversation over text? It could be a different thing entirely, or it could be the same thing vibrating at a lower frequency. 

When you reach across the void and transmit a text message, it's not clear whether you are projecting your presence or only your words. Are you the guy across town sending a smoke signal or are you the little guy in their phone? It seems like that might actually be up to your interlocutor to decide.

You may then be tempted, after a great first date, to ask for a sealed letter to be placed in escrow. A written record of exactly how they feel about you, to be opened only in the event your association's end.

But before you do, consider whether or not the true thoughts of others would horrify you.