6 September - Havre, MT

Another day of pedaling the great midwestern plain of eastern Montana. Today’s accomplishment was going 100 miles in 4 hours and 14 minutes, including a slight delay when one of my rear panniers flew off into a ditch (Needless to say, I was more than a little irked at the dirt clod responsible for that). My secret is in having the wind behind me and at very high speeds. I am growing more comfortable—or perhaps less annoyed—with the featureless terrain. Of course it helps to be going so fast without much struggling (at one point I was traveling 36 mph on level terrain). I entertain myself in a variety of fashions: singing songs —whether rock songs I have recordings of, versions of those same songs with silly lyrics, silly songs of my own, and impromptu songs of praise—thinking about art, reality, existence, and St. Augustine, and just staring at the road and rolling plains. There is a certain art, or science or practice, of quieting the mind, of enjoying simple sensations and thoughts. In a media-rich world this is not altogether easy, and I am not surprised it took so long to become comfortable with 4–6 hours of very limited stimulus. Nevertheless, it is easier going when there is much beauty to look at; on the other hand I have no sadness at leaving any of this terrain behind. I would like to continue, at least to Wolf Point and possibly beyond. The only difficulty I face, should I find a tent pole, is that there are not a lot of places to camp out here, and my funds can’t support staying in motels even if they run as cheaply as the El Toro Inn ($37.45).

More on reality: if it is true that our words for significance and our words for weight are of the same origin—if it means essentially the same thing that a rock has matter because it is significant to move, and reality matters (as opposed to a dream) because its results are significant—then perhaps it is not merely the technology of media—of books and televisions and movies—that casts doubt on the reality of what I experience. Perhaps it is as much the technology of locomotion and flight, transporting us over vast distances in hours and minutes instead of days and weeks, as well as the technology of medicine, easing pain and quite literally bringing life to the dead and dying, that diminish the significance of the world around us. In the matrix of a cybernetically simulated reality, a walk through the mountains might be as unreal as a flight in a commercial jetliner, but the level of detail required for the first simulcrum is astonishingly greater than that required for the second. There are computer programs that will let you fly various aircraft around the world; so far there are none that will let you take a walk in the park.

Technology, then, makes it easier to simulate (to make an illusion which approximates) reality, by distancing us from directly experiencing the detail, and the power, of reality. For that is the one thing that can be said about the real: it is powerful. We see this in movies about virtual reality, in that to frighten us these illusions must have the power to kill in reality. So I wonder what a world would be like in which reality lost its one heretofore irrevocable power: to kill us. If anyone could be brought back from the dead, from grave illness or accident or murder, what then would we think of this thing we call reality? If death was no longer real, would life be real either? Or would it take on the tone of a video game, where a simple keypress will restore you to life? Am I the only one who finds video games ultimately unsatisfying?

So far, then, there is one criterion for reality: its effects are permanent. It pays its price in that to be real, it must stay real. It cannot vanish into the stuff of illusion. The desk a carpenter puts together remains a desk. A dead person remains dead, a broken tent pole remains broken, no matter how ardently I might wish the change to have only been a stray dream. I wrote once that perhaps at the gate of life we were asked what we would like to be, and that this life, this human life, was only given to us if we were willing to pay the admission price: dying. So it is with being real, which is a lesser form of life. You only get to be real if you pay the price of remaining real.

Yet there must be more to reality, I think, than this one criterion. For it cannot answer the question of memory. If reality requires remaining real, then my perception of my own reality—caught up in what I believe I have seen and done—depends on my ability to remember. If I am struck with amnesia, does the reality of my past cease to exist? Likewise, what differs me from someone who only remembers what I did?

The answer does not immediately occur to me. So I will digress into another nascent strand, the levels of existence. Mere existence, to be, entails all sorts of possibility. Illusions exist as well as reality, yet reality seems a higher order of existence. An idea exists but may not yet be realized. So far my catalogue is only three deep: being, reality, and living. I will try to deepen the list later.

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