If anything bolsters our instinctive revulsion to game-changing technology, it’s that so much of it makes us physically queasy. Much of our experienced technology involves sensory conflicts that inadvertently activate an ancient digestive reflex. Since the first mariner failed to find his sea legs, the story of human limit-pushing has been one big barf-fest. There’s illness in response to inertial motion: carsickness, plane sickness, space sickness and roller coaster sickness. Riding on camels and elephants will do it, with the low-frequency oscillation of their gait. But the word ‘nausea’ shares its Greek roots with ‘nautical’, and originally referred to seasickness. An urge to hurl may even await someone travelling only slightly faster than nature intended.
All I wanted to do this weekend was to slide down a stupid mountain in Davos, Switzerland. Many possibilities occurred to me on the lift train to the top of the ski hill – that I would crash and find out whether I had any kind of health coverage here, that I would be shown up by my client’s expert skier of a nine-year-old daughter, that I would make a wrong turn and have to bust out my horrendous German. What I did not expect was to be heaving Bircher muesli into the snow on the second run.
One of the ornaments that will come down from the attic in the next few weeks has a fairy wearing a blue gown on it; she’s sitting on a crescent moon. This picture has a quote below it: “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairytales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairytales.” It’s attributed to Albert Einstein.