Cell-phones rule OK?

Everyone now-a-days has a cell-phone. We sit down to dinner, are together in the lounge or in church, and out come the cell-phones. Never mind talking - it's easier to chat even when in the same room. I have a Pixel-2 and I love it. I can video chat with my daughter in Australia or son in Alaska. It is my watch, calendar, camera, GPS enabled map, music and video player and recorder, calculator, internet browser - and then there are apps and games. No need for an encyclopedia - hardly any need of prayer for guidance - Google does it all! It does so much more than being a portable 'phone. And I take great care of it. But of course you know all this because you, too, have a cell-phone. Even if you think yourself computer-illiterate. You probably pay for data too - and by the time you add up the cost of the phone and the service charges you are likely paying out a considerable sum per year for the privilege.

Not only that, I've been to Africa where many folk are poor, living in one room hovels, rarely able to afford more than beans and rice to eat. And yet they all have cell-phones.

Hand in hand with the internet, the ubiquitous cell-phone is an unprecedented invention, a miracle of modern technology, a paradigm changer. And yet most folk are very hum-drum about it and seemingly take the whole show for granted, indeed communication with friends and access to the internet has more or less become a universal inalienable right. We soon complain when we lose connectivity for any reason. A big truck took down our overhead fibre feed a couple of days back and it hasn't been fixed yet (it is Easter weekend) - but J has kindly jerry-rigged a feed from a property we own up the road to keep our insatiable appetite fed.

I am reminded of the little maiden's globe in Phantastes. This book is a bit like the Bible in that the imagery is vivid and beautiful but often hard to interpret. Indeed I am not at all sure that an exact interpretation is intended.

She came along singing and dancing, happy as a child, though she seemed almost a woman. In her hands--now in one, now in another--she carried a small globe, bright and clear as the purest crystal. This seemed at once her plaything and her greatest treasure. At one moment, you would have thought her utterly careless of it, and at another, overwhelmed with anxiety for its safety. But I believe she was taking care of it all the time, perhaps not least when least occupied about it.

The protagonist Anodos narrates... I put out both my hands and laid hold of it. It began to sound as before. The sound rapidly increased, till it grew a low tempest of harmony, and the globe trembled, and quivered, and throbbed between my hands. I had not the heart to pull it away from the maiden, though I held it in spite of her attempts to take it from me; yes, I shame to say, in spite of her prayers, and, at last, her tears. The music went on growing in, intensity and complication of tones, and the globe vibrated and heaved; till at last it burst in our hands, and a black vapour broke upwards from out of it; then turned, as if blown sideways, and enveloped the maiden, hiding even the shadow in its blackness. She held fast the fragments, which I abandoned, and fled from me into the forest in the direction whence she had come, wailing like a child, and crying, 'You have broken my globe; my globe is broken--my globe is broken!'

Then much later in the book he meets the little maiden again, and she recounts:

You broke my globe. Yet I thank you. Perhaps I owe you many thanks for breaking it. I took the
pieces, all black, and wet with crying over them, to the Fairy Queen. There was no music and no light in them now. But she took them from me, and laid them aside; and made me go to sleep in a great hall of white, with black pillars, and many red curtains. When I woke in the morning, I went to her, hoping to have my globe again, whole and sound; but she sent me away without it, and I have not seen it since. Nor do I care for it now. I have something so much better. I do not need the globe to play to me; for I can sing. I could not sing at all before. Now I go about everywhere through Fairy Land, singing till my heart is like to break, just like my globe, for very joy at my own songs. And wherever I go, my songs do good, and deliver people. And now I have delivered you, and I am so happy.

Perhaps if there was an EMP, like the solar storm of 1859, that put out all telecommunications and rendered cell-phone virtually useless, we might learn to sing. And, singing, put the world to rights.