There was a time when being caught talking to oneself was regarded as a sign of madness. Not any more. In fact, talking to oneself is now recommended as a cure for brain damage. The solution, it appears, to the health risks posed by mobile phones is for users to use a small microphone pinned to their lapels, thus avoiding having their heads in prolonged, possibly dangerous, contact with the receiver/transmitter. I have already encountered people walking around using these devices. At first encounter they are indistinguishable from lunatics.
I believe there is something deeper here for us to look at. If mobile phones pose a threat to our health, maybe this is nature's way of telling us we do not need them, or that they are damaging to us in other ways. If one was to imagine oneself in the world before cities were invented, it would be impossible, I believe, to anticipate the effect of putting millions of people in close proximity to one another. The way cities have evolved would be the last thing you would guess at.
I remember, when I was in my early 20s, the experience of standing on a hot summer's day in a field at the centre of a farm in Loughglynn, Co Roscommon, and reflecting on how frustrating it seemed that, at that very same moment, there were people walking, talking, rushing, bustling on Baggot Street in Dublin. I thought of Baggot Street because I had been there several times and was on reasonably intimate terms with its appearance and state of busyness.
Here in the country I was surrounded by silence. The nearest house or road was half a mile away. The only sounds were those of birds and the wind, occasionally broken by perhaps the thud of a sledge on a fencing post in the far distance.
There was nobody to talk to, nobody to watch. If you were to ask me at that moment to imagine a place in which people lived, worked and ate side by side, in which humanity moved fluidly in a common space - in other words, a city - I would have drawn a warm picture of human communication, co-operation and intimacy. I would have imagined that the more people lived together in the same space, the greater their sense of closeness and fellow-feeling.
But this notion, which would have been drawn from the wishfulness of my own isolation, would have been utter fantasy. For, as we well know, the more people live together in close proximity, the farther apart they tend to grow. In truth, there is not a street or a train or a bus in London, Paris or Dublin which is in any sense less lonely than the most isolated field in Co Roscommon.
Dublin, not being as big as, for example, London, is not yet as lonesome as it might be. For some time now I have been trying to put my finger on the precise difference in the respective moods of a London Underground train and a DART train in Dublin. I have long been aware that such a distinction existed, but I had previously been unable to separate it entirely from my own idiosyncratic sense of either location.
But now I am convinced that the difference lies in sounds. The DART, for all that it is the cutting edge of efforts to destroy the intimacy of the ages, still has a certain quality of the parish pump. People still talk to each other, and not just those who happen to be travelling together.
If you stop and listen to the sound of the DART, or if the DART stops on the line and you just listen, you realise that there is something there still of the quality which I might have fondly imagined from my field in Loughglynn. London tubes, however, are almost always bereft of spontaneous human conversation. This is not to say that people do not talk on the Underground. In fact, when people travel together on the Underground, they sometimes seem to talk loudly and animatedly, in an almost exaggerated fashion, to each other. I can never quite make out whether they are trying to shut out the silence of their fellow passengers or simply taunt them with the notion that they, at least, still have some friends.
On the DART, conversation is intimate. People do not do it for show. The quality of the sound is of a low hum, evenly spread throughout the carriage. On the Underground, the sound is of deathly silence punctuated by frantic outbursts of talk and laughter.
Sometimes, however, I have had the experience of sitting on a London tube train and suddenly finding myself transfixed by the sound of human conversation which immediately strikes me as real, warm and truly intimate. A voice, confident and clear, will pronounce some term of endearment and convey some trivial piece of information. There will be a short burst of laughter born out of genuine pleasure. But even before I look, I know this person is speaking on a mobile phone.
The mobile phone has made an extraordinary difference to the codes and manners of telephone communication. I do not mean ease of use or transportation, but rather the way in which the mobile seems to have finally liberated us from any pretence of privacy. Once, a public telephone was something to be whispered into while you turned your back on the crowd.
Today, a mobile telephone is a way of saying: "There is more to my life than sitting on trains. I have somewhere to go and someone there who waits for me". I have noticed from observing my fellow passengers on the London Underground that at no time are they as animated as when they are speaking on mobile telephones.
The mobile phone is the instrument of the anonymous city. It is interesting that the Americans call them "cellphones". The mobile phone belongs to the octopus-shaped communities which cities breed in the midst of their suffocating alienation.
It is useful, of course, in maintaining contact between the individual and the small cell of friends and acquaintances which often seems to represent the totality of the life of a modern citydweller, but in truth it is not so much an instrument of communication as an instrument of non-communication. It enables the user to impart information and greetings within his or her own network, but far more loudly to say to all those within eye- or earshot: "I do not care to talk to you."
It is not surprising that the mobile phone carries risks of illness and damage, for anything which to such an extent attempted to rework the fundamental nature of human contact would be bound to do so. First we invent the city so that we can be together; then we invent the mobile telephone so that we can talk to anyone but those around us.