IT IS SAID, for either comfort or confidence, that God so orders the world that there is "someone for everyone." It is said, by some latter-day Calvinists, that God has assigned this selected one to you from the master moment of Creation; that you will be taken to cleave to them, and only to them, if only your faith allows His will to be done.... on Earth as it is in Heaven.
On our Earth, however, it seems that a power other than God has intervened in this order. It seems that now a different metric is in play in our lives with the advent of the new and updated Devil's workshop made modern, the Internet.
Here, should you wish to push through the endless forms, filings, fittings and radio
buttons on a site such as eHarmony or Match.com you shall emerge into a new realm of possibilities. There, whirling within unknown terabytes of ones and zeroes, the Holy Algorithm of eHarmony/Match will palliate your existential loneliness with the system's assurance that there is no longer "some one for every one," but many thousands for every one.
With a valid credit card a small offering is made, and you are connected to all these perfect matches made not in Heaven but in the realm of numbers theory. It is love made lucid and gone mobile. For a fee much less than a tithe, The System will put at your disposal an entire universe of carefully selected mates, a new order of voluntary eugenics in which the value of the One and Only is automatically degraded by the presence of the Many and More.
Mirabile dictu! Surely this is the wonder of the age. How miraculous to have -- at our point and click -- a cornucopia of perfect potential mates selected without the intervention of human hands. On screen after screen they are spread out before us like a Whitman's Sampler the size and shape of idaho -- broad at the base, narrow at the tip, but still containing a large number of tasty choices all the way to the top. How superb. How extraordinary in its ordinariness. Either that or it's the age in which our lodestone hearts themselves can become 'distracted by distraction from distraction' as never before. I suspect it is more of the latter than the former.
Posted by Vanderleun at June 30, 2005 4:49 AM | TrackBack"It is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood." -- Karl Popper N.B.: Comments are moderated to combat spam and may not appear immediately. Comments that exceed the obscenity or stupidity limits will be either edited or expunged.