This time it took a week of two-hour walks to return me to fighting form. Even now, though, it's not as if I avoid modern amenities like e-mail and Entertainment Weekly. As a result, I still have real problems physically focusing on big things that are far away for more than a few seconds at a time. As I write this, for example, I sit fifty yards from a row of towering trees at the Cabot end of the Radcliffe Quad. When I try to train a steady gaze on them, however, my eyes quickly jump to lock on a short, scrawny sapling ten feet in front of me. Only with extraordinary effort can I return my stare to the trees.

My experiences coming home from Ireland or outside from my thesis chamber may be extreme, but my tendency toward the short view is not. If you walk through Harvard Yard at night, you will see few first-years outdoors. Through the windows of their dorm rooms, however, you can spot scores of pale faces, often alone save the illumination of a nearby monitor. Like me, these people live largely in a world of two-foot radiuses. Our numbers are only growing.

Eye-strain aside, my worry is not that we spend so much time looking at little things so near, but rather that soon we won't have a choice. Modern technology brings ever-increasing proportions of work and play to our monitors with amazing efficiency and convenience. No matter how modern the technology, however, it can't show us anything bigger than the physical area of our monitors or farther away than the physical distance of our monitors from our chairs.

Tonight I will walk to the center of the Radcliffe Quad at midnight. I will try to ignore the pale faces illuminated by monitors in the surrounding dorm room windows. I will lay on my back and I will look up at something very big, very far away.

I invite you to join me.

Jeremy N. Smith '00 is a history and literature concentrator in Pforzheimer House. This is his final column.