Virtually absurd
When you don’t see people face to face and all your interactions are by phone or over the Internet, life can take on an unreal quality. It feels as if we’re living virtual lives, not real ones. Maybe that’s why writers put the adjective “virtual” on virtually everything. Instead of real learning, we have “virtual learning.” There was talk of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates having a “virtual debate,” apparently in lieu of actually debating. Yet perversely, people we barely know on Facebook are “friends,” not “virtual friends.”
We need to hang on to the reality of life. The term “virtual” means being not quite something or being simulated. If something is “virtually impossible,” it still has a glimmer of possibility.
Many things are now simulated on the Internet because we can’t do them in real life; there are virtual meetings, virtual classrooms, virtual attendance, etc. That’s legitimate. But the outcomes ought to be real. Virtual classrooms should result in real learning, or what’s the point? Distance doesn’t make things less real. People have debated by correspondence for thousands of years; why does distance suddenly make debates “virtual”?
The word “virtual” is an antonym of “literal.” Maybe the long history of abusing “literal” has made the abuse of its opposite inevitable. If you can say someone “literally exploded” when there was no explosion, then why not say you “virtually learned” when you actually learned?
“Virtual,” like “algorithm,” is a trendy word to stick everywhere because it makes the writer sound computer-smart. But it’s virtual smartness, just the appearance of it. Let’s hold on to what’s real in life and not dismiss everything we do at a distance as “virtual.”
A movie was made of it in 1984. Ende didn’t like it. It has some scenes that live up to the book, which is saying a lot. As a whole, though, it fails. It stops about halfway through the novel and tacks on a nonsensical ending. The most gripping or frightening scenes from the book are omitted or toned down.
Piranesi without saying too much. As in an adventure game, the world-building comes to the foreground. The narrator lives in a huge house which is his entire world. It has hundreds of halls and thousands of statues. The staircases seem scaled for giants. The House is so large that it has tides, seasonal snowfall, and a wildlife ecosystem. Yet as far as the narrator knows, it has only two inhabitants. The narrator is as much of a mystery as the house is, even to himself.