Out of Egypt:

I'm listening to music; I'm in my world now

Earbuds sprout over the campus like dandelions. I wave at someone; she passes, oblivious. Music, through iPod's mediation, is her world.

Linnea nails this trend. The other day Emily Belz referenced one of my favorite parts of Pascal's Pensees, which I find quite relevant. The Pensees were never finally ordered, so I can't find the exact part that I want, but this seems to be the general sense of it:

139. When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town. A commission in the army would not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town; and men only seek conversation and entering games, because they cannot remain with pleasure at home.

Walker Percy, if I've understood The Last Self-Help Book correctly, would say this is because we, when faced with the essential nullity of our being, the vacuole of self, that nullity whose depth we cannot comprehended, we are astounded and dismayed. And so we seek diversion from ourselves by whatever means we can. I, a man of words blowing in the wind, as I wrote of myself in a recent poem, seek it through blogging and other ways in which I can clothe my non-self in the trappings of thought. Others, more easily and simply, seek it through music. I, too, at times find myself absorbed in song. And sometimes I feel as if that were a form of praise. But when is it me singing and when am I simply lost?