The Current Discussion: For Valentine’s Day, this question: What is the future of love?
I was perplexed with this question, as my crystal ball is in the repair shop for a software upgrade. So I Googled the L-word--what else is there to do these days? Out poured more than 2 billion “hits,” and then it hit me.....there are probably as many definitions for love as there are people on this planet. Be it the universal love of parents and children, or stories, commandments, poems and odes in all languages, songs, acts, customs, edicts and deeds going back to the beginning of time. Even the early Mr. Caveman had to hunt a wild animal and make a fur coat for Mrs. Caveman, if only to keep alive the commercial spirit of Valentine’s Day!
With this development, I went back to the old reliable standard and Googled “life,” to find a bond between life and love. Disappointingly, the top item on this search result was about a NBC TV cop show series and a life prison term for a crime not committed. (Amazing how politics reflect performance arts and television shows!)
Astounded and disappointed, I crossed over to Yahoo! and researched both words. Yahoo! produced the same rankings, the cop show as the top answer for life. But it seemed that Yahoo! has a mind for more lively and lovely details than its rival-- it returned 3.5 billion answers on “love” and 5.1 billion results on life vs. Google’s 2.9 billion. I wonder if I am tangled up in statistics and can’t get a feel for it.
But I now have a better grasp why Yahoo! rebuffed Microsoft’s personal ad for a matrimonial union and the blessing of the money bishops of Wall Street, even though Microsoft had offered half of its 2007 earnings in a community property scheme. My confusion reached a new level when I clicked the “Free Dating Tips”-sponsored search result, only to find out that I had to part with cash to get the free advice advertised. Who knows? In this day and age, it might turn out to be a website about palms and sweet dates that one eats. With the credit card at its limit in this age of credit crunch, I abandoned that line of thought.
Puzzled and slightly bewildered, I went back to basics and started a more tangible search in books and classic literature. I thumbed thru Omar Khayyam, Hafez, Shakespeare, Frost, Fitzgerald, and von Goethe until I realized that it has been a long time since I last read these lessons. Will I find time to read Pushkin again, and ponder about Ruslan and Ludmila? It is amazing how routines of the modern age steer us away from the essence of being. Petty little distractions are now stitched together as some sort of a rip-off mislabelled as modern life of hyper-infotainment. My grandparents lived perfect and happy lives without knowing what happened to the Britney Spears of their time, some 11 time zones away. Are we beyond the point of return to the inner peace and solace of Hilton’s Lost Horizon? And are we confusing Paris with James?
An escape to the music collection left me more mystified. The list of songs and odes about love and life is endless, especially if you are downloading it all at discount rates. Romance was high on the minds of Chopin, Gershwin, Aretha Franklin, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the past, or modern hip-hop artists and neo-classical singers of our present time. But why are we all so dismissive of what we have? And are we so absorbed in theatre that we cannot appreciate the art?
That is one answer that I would love to know, but I couldn’t find time to search Yahoo! Perhaps some of the 4000 satellite TV channels will eventually let me know, in one language or another, when I am not too busy downloading distractions on yet another gizmo.
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