Forgetting what I Remember

This morning I read on article on "the wane of reading" in America. Upon finishing my perusal of such an articulate article, I felt as though I was able to return to a place that I left a long time ago. This is place is "a made place"--the imagination, and it serves an often unobservable purpose, which is that of reflection, of looking again at experience and seeing more than what appears initially on the surface (sometimes this "first impression" involves nothing at all). Perhaps what has brought on this wave of laziness, lack of patience, lack of concentration are the instant yet transitory rewards (if we may call them by such a positive name) that television, the Internet, computers, video games, leave us with. Well, one cannot say that I have indulged in much of these technological splendors in Japan (I don't watch TV, I email far less than in the states, the expensive hand held video game unit that I purchased was a mistake), but yet I don't feel all that more reflective. Yes perhaps there is something deeper than just these machines coaxing us into the virtual space of who we would be if we weren't ourselves. It seems like people spend a lot of money these days, perhaps because they have more money as well as time, on things which help them avoid themself. The pursuit of an ideal image is what I mean--the you after a genie has granted you three wishes (note: this outcome can, obviously enough, have its own pitfalls). So, while we find more ways to be happy, we start spending more money on it. We find more ways to communicate, but we communicate less. There are more places to find books, a greater need to read them, but we read less. And now, I am typing away at a jounral that won't do much for anyone, maybe myself, maybe a random figure that looms in my future--a person that will skim these archives and find something that flickered in luminosity for a second, helping him or her with some crisis of great or small proportions.