Room in New York

Look at this picture. It's by Edward Hopper, in case you didn't know. It's called "Room in New York." It's a very simple picture. A view through a window of an apartment. A table. A chair. A piano. Couple of pictures on the wall. A door leading to somewhere else, closed. The man reads the paper, bent over, concentrating hard. The woman idly taps out a tune with one finger on the piano. There's a lot of emotion in this room, none of it very good. There's loneliness. Maybe anger. A desire for something else. Does the woman want to turn and speak to the man? Does she wish he would look up from his paper and talk to her? Does she even still care anymore? And how about the man? Is he concentrating so hard on his paper so he won't have to concentrate on her? Does he wish she would stop playing that same tune over and over again on that piano? Does he want to get up and walk out that door? But the door is closed, and the window marks the boundaries of the room. They're framed there, these two, trapped in this absurd situation, two people living separately in the same room. No exit.

When I first really got to know my friend Carlton, we were both teaching at the University of Idaho (Yes, Idaho does have a university!). We shared an office together. One day, I was sitting at my desk, my back to him, playing solitaire on the computer. At some point, I turned around. He was sitting at his computer, his back to me, playing solitaire. It amused me to think that here were two human beings sitting in the same room playing the same game but not together. I suggested that we turn off our computers and play Scrabble, a good English major's game. He agreed. A friendship was born across that Scrabble board. But I see others all of the time who are locked in these same silent relationships, and I believe cell phones and social networks are only compounding the problem. Once, I saw two teenage girls walking down the street together, but they weren't talking to each other. Instead, they were texting. They walked by in silence, heads down, eyes glued to their tiny screens, chipmunking away. Two people together, yet apart. And people wonder why they feel lonely. They have hundreds of "friends" on Facebook, and they're constantly in touch with their "friends" via e-mail and twitter and texting, but they never talk, they never touch. They live side-by-side in the same world, furiously concentrating on not being physically together, "friends" without commitment, without obligation. And they wonder why they're lonely.