TV: the new hearth

This week the theme of This American Life was television. During Act One, David Rakoff, who literally hadn't taken the TV out of his closet since college, explored what happened when he dusted off the set and tuned back into mainstream American life. Rakoff concluded that what made him uncomfortable about television wasn't really the content of the programming or keeping up his intellectual image, but the fact that he lives alone. He concluded that watching TV was fine for people with spouses and families, but for people who live alone, well...he recounted the story of an elderly man found alone in his apartment. The man had been dead for almost a year, and he was still watching the channel that was playing when he died.

The funny thing about Rakoff's conclusion is that I feel exactly the same way. I enjoy watching a program with my husband, but when I'm home alone, I feel uneasy turning on the TV. To me television is a communal activity- fun together, sad alone.

Since I haven't met a lot of other people who feel this way, I figured David Rakoff and I were just mutant writer weirdos. But this morning Barbara Freese chimed in with the answer to our lone viewer malaise.

In her book Coal: A Human History, Freese writes that Americans (as their English counterparts before them) strongly resisted changing from the open hearth to the stove, despite the stove's overwhelming practical advantages. To explain the stubborness of our predecessors, she points out that "flickering light...had been the daily focal point of our species' domestic life since before we were fully human" and explains that it was distressing when the warm glow of the open hearth disappeared into the bowels of a stove. Freese then goes on to speculate that the loss of the flickering open hearth "helps explain why a substitute form of flickering light, in the form of television, would be so warmly embraced a century later."

So, for some of us overly introspective people, watching TV alone is equivalent to curling up in front of the fire without the person we love- and it just isn't the same.

The open hearth gave us food and warmth; the television entertains us. But both offer something else just as important: a sense of comfort, a place to gather, a center for our family existence. It makes me wish the Yule Log, the crackling open hearth broadcast on a NYC television station for Christmas, could pop and smoke on my LCD flat screen all year long.