Sitting in a breakfast café with a small child I gather from the news of Sunday night’s Emmy Awards that we’re in the midst of a new golden age of television and that I am a foreigner in my own country since I stopped watching TV in 1982. No wonder I’m having a hard time understanding younger people. I never saw “Flu Bug” or “Name of Stones.” I may as well be an undocumented guy from Guatemala. I quit TV around the time I stopped smoking, the two being psychologically linked, and also I was writing a novel at the time and working a day job and there simply wasn’t time for sitting and staring. So this golden age goes on without me. I don’t miss smoking, though I remember how elegant a cigarette felt between my first and second fingers and the expressiveness of exhalation. And I doubt I’ll return to TV, though I enjoy watching people watching the screens in airports, their petrified faces as if they’ve been shot up with novocaine. I don’t see them laugh or show emotion, they just sit stunned as if concussed. Whereas, sitting this morning in a café in Washington with my friend Heather, looking at her eight-month-old Ida Rose, is a fabulous show, the intensity of an infant’s curiosity about morsels of food, her mother’s fingers, my attempts to get her to smile by making soft flatulent sounds. I take her on my lap and she chews on my finger. She has sharp teeth. The avid interest of this little being, her curiosity about every ordinary thing in the immediate vicinity, is how I want to live my life. I never watched a single episode of “The Apprentice” and so I am ignorant of American government. Nothing I learned in Political Science 101 is operative anymore. But that’s okay. I’m sitting in a café in an enormous hotel atrium, eating generic oatmeal and drinking black coffee, with my friend and her beautiful child. There are three TVs within fifty feet of me, morning news programs, hosts chatting behind a desk, very amiable, chuckling, gesturing, showing intense interest. The sound is off. It’s a silent puppet show and it tells us that the world has not ended, no cataclysm has occurred, men in suits and a woman in a pale blue dress have a handle on things. Read the rest of the column >>> | 
