Sure, it’s convenient, but it’s not conversation. The expectations are strange and unnatural. There is zero musicality to texting back and forth compared to the importance of timing and tone and time spent without talking when we’re side by side with one another.
Shortly after a motorcycle passed that didn't seem as loud as I expected it would be on the recording, I mention a quote from Sebastian Junger's "Tribe", in full here:
“Here I have no master,” an anonymous colonial woman was quoted by the secretary of the French legation as saying about her life with the Indians. “I am the equal of all the women in the tribe, I do what I please without anyone’s saying anything about it, I work only for myself, I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”
Another quote, cited from Tribe and attributed to Ben Franklin: “When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”
The Texting Debacle