BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
I walked past the Old Town Hall, now a museum, its neat neoclassical facade a monument to certainties dead and buried. He was sitting on the war memorial steps opposite. A tramp, unquestionably. His face was a geological survey of the West Country; crevasses of hard winters, upheavals of cheap cider. His hands, wrapped around a can in a paper bag, were maps of a life not spent in libraries. An anorak that had seen better decades. Trousers held with a frayed belt.
He nodded. I nodded back. For a while we shared the space, listening to the bells from Holy Cross, where the future Archbishop of Canterbury was working her stuff. Then he spoke, his voice stones grinding at low tide.
‘They’ve forgotten how to talk to the dark.’
I waited.
‘The real dark. Not the absence of a streetlamp. The absence of everything else. Before the telly, even before the radio, before the internet, when the sun went down you were alone with your own head. This town knows about the dark. In 1743, fire took four hundred houses here. Sixteen died, two thousand left with nothing. They had to talk to the dark then, or it would eat them alive. They had to be their own companions.’
The interior life. The private dialogue that constitutes the self. An antique concept.
‘And now?’
‘Now they’re terrified. They’ve lit the whole town with thousands of tiny blue flames. They carry the sun in their pocket. They walk past this very spot where people died, where a wigmaker crawled into a barrel while his neighbours burnt to a crisp, and they don’t look up. They flee from the quiet into a clamour of empty signals. They post their souls on a wall and wait for strangers to press a little heart. They have outsourced their own inner voice.’ His eyes were the colour of stagnant water. ‘What happens when the power goes out, and all that’s left is the silence, and they find they have nothing to say?’
This is the sickness. We have built a civilisation on the eradication of boredom, on the instant gratification of every neural tic. We have mistaken communication for communion, opinion for wisdom. We are an army of tannoys and megaphones, shouting into a void of our own making, mistaking the echo for a reply.
This was not a lament. It was a diagnosis. The tech oligarchs with their talk of ‘connection’ are not builders. They are landlords of the attention economy, and the rent is our sanity. They have monetised our fear of being alone.
‘My grandson,’ he said, staring into the paper bag. ‘Fourteen. Knows everything about a world that doesn’t exist. Builds empires on a screen but can’t mend a puncture. Has a thousand friends he’ll never meet. I once asked him what he thought about, when he wasn’t looking at his little machine. He looked at me as if I’d asked him to speak Swahili. “Nothing. Why would I think about nothing?”‘
Why would I think about nothing? The ultimate victory of the machine. To have made the interior silence not just uncomfortable, but incomprehensible.
This is the relevance of that conversation on Crediton High Street. It is not about technology. It is about what we have become in its image. We have traded the difficult business of being a self for the frictionless experience of being a user. We have traded the conversation with the dark for a permanent light pollution of the soul.
We see it everywhere. In the performative outrage that passes for politics. In the hollowing out of public spaces; where the market once filled that Crediton street. In the death of the novel, not because people stopped reading, but because they lost patience for a single, sustained voice. They prefer the flicker, the fragment, the 280-character burst of ersatz profundity.
The tramp finished his cider and set the can down with a clink.
‘They think it’s freedom,’ he said, standing slowly, his joints protesting. ‘All that choice. All that noise. But it’s a cage with a thousand doors, and none of them lead anywhere. Real freedom is sitting with yourself in the dark and not being afraid.’
I sat on the steps, and watched the people pass with their eyes on their screens.
For the first time in longer than I cared to remember, I had nothing to say. And for a moment, it was not terrifying. It was simply the sound of being alive. The sound before the noise began.
Rest in peace, Peter.
Your wisdom is missed.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).