With a profound sadness I have just said farewell to one of my best friends who is now lost to me forever. He has bought a television set.
The man who buys a television set departs from the world of living men and enters another word of shadows. I do not blame my friend. The real world, I suppose, is just too much for him as it is for millions of others.
My friend does not realize, of course, that he is in full retreat from actuality. He supposes, on the contrary, that he is boldly advancing into the fierce current of these times by bringing the world, with all its events and human figures, into his living room. That is the great current illusion. The shadows are mistaken for things.
Now, television is a wonderful invention. I have no word to say against it, so long as it is confined to other people's houses where, in my weaker moments, I may see it occasionally free. But it brings no one closer to life. It merely inter- poses a gaudy curtain between lift and the spectator. It is only the latest gadget contrived by thoughtful men to make sure that nobody does any real thinking for himself.
My friend will answer that he will now receive the best thoughts of the ablest minds in the world and see their faces as they deliver them. He will see events as they unfold at first hand, with a time lag of half a second or less.
Of course, he will. But he won't understand anything better. He will understand less than ever. For the grim, inescap- able fact of human understanding is that it must be private, must come from within and cannot be plastered on like stucco from the outside. A man may secure knowledge from others. He will never secure understanding. Though it is presented in a million different versions, the paramount problem of modern man is to find a satisfactory participation in modern life. And it is there that he is most obviously failing.
He can turn a screw on the assembly line, but as the finished automobile comes off at the end, he has no satisfaction in its creation. Or if he works in a white collar he can add up all the figures of business on an adding machine without once touching the realities a life as the country storekeeper touches them. He swarms in his multitudes to watch hockey game but he does not play hockey.
In other words, for the essential purposes of life, modern man is becoming a spectator, not a participant, a customer not a creator, a consumer in the main and only incidentally a producer. Thus by a law as old as Eden he becomes sick under a hectic outward flush. His physical diet is better than ever but he sickens by a secret malnutrition of the soul.
According to the author, his friend has bought a television in order to_____.
A．know the current events
B．entertain himself at leisure time
C．escape from the reality
D．kill time
