Time and Distance Overcome essay

We are, today in modern society, more than ever used to the fact that telephones (and now smartphones) play a major role in our everyday lives. It’s almost as if its become a part of us - a new limb, you might say. Believe it or not, though, it wasn’t always like that.

In the essay “Time and Distance Overcome” (2008) Eula Biss tells the story of how the phone initially struggled in America, but finally succeeded and become a normal thing in every household. She uses ethos in the first paragraph by showing that she knows history and what went on at the time. This increases her credibility. She then quickly moves on to logos, as she, in the second paragraph, tries to argue as to why the telephone as a concept at the time would have seemed completely ridiculous. As she writes:

“The idea on which the telephone depended - the idea that every home in the country could be connected with a vast network of wires suspended from poles set an average of one hundred feet apart - seemed far more unlikely than the idea that the human voice could be transmitted through wire”.

She quickly tries to establish her pathos: “Even now it is an impossible idea, that we are all connected, all of us”. By using the phrase “all of us” she makes the reader feel more comfortable and involved, which in turn makes the reader more interested in the text.

The structure of the text is coherent, and the theme is presented early on (that the world was not waiting for the telephone). The sentences are a mix of long and short ones, and complex, paratactic and hypotactic sentences are mixed all together. The language is mostly colloquial, with some adjectives and adverbs. There are no sound effects like examples of alliteration or assonance. There is some symbolism involved in the part where she tells about how a lot of black men were hanged from the telephone poles. They could be representing crosses, which would mean that the black men would then represent Jesus and that they would be killed for other people’s sins. This is however a rather Christian point of view, but still something that you could suggest would be worth noting. There are a lot of references to the specific stories and places where the lynching and murdering of black males took place. Biss describes in detail how and where they were executed. She also has a little personal story after she is done with the whole historical perspective and how things got to be. She tells us that her grandfather was a lineman, and that he broke his back when a telephone pole fell onto him. This shows us that she also has some personal ties bound to the story of the telephone, and that she in that sense is involved. She tells that when she was young, she thought that “the arc and swoop of telephone wires along the roadways were beautiful.” But that her view on this has since then changed, and she now tells her sister that she does not look at them in the same way.

The circumstances that caused the writer to produce this text could perhaps be the fact that around the time that this essay was wrote, USA was electing the first ever black president. This could prove a strong contrast and show how much the American people had grown over the last 150 years, but also to inform some people who might not have known how the situation was once upon a time.

In the essay, Biss puts a lot of emphasis on both the fact that people were reluctant to the change that the invention of the telephone brought, but also the fact that many black men were lynched, hanged, and strung up over the telephone poles. If we take a look at the former, Biss gives us a hint as to why the cutting down of poles all over USA was such a huge deal. As she writes, the war on telephone poles was fuelled by the American concern for private property and “a reluctance to surrender it to a shared utility”. I guess most of us have heard about the American citizens who cherish their freedom and independence so much. This, coupled with the fact that the industrialization at the time was booming which meant skyscrapers, big machinery, factories and much more, which all meant that the visual look of peoples everyday lives changed drastic. It is not hard to understand that people reacted so harshly to something that in such a way distorted the street view.

The fact that a lot of black men were killed and/or hanged in these poles could perhaps be an aftermath of the civil war which had just ended some decades ago. There were still a lot of racial controversy all over USA, and it lead to riots and more. As to the intention of Eula Biss and her essay, I can only guess. And my guess is that she chose to angle the story of the telephone and how it came to use in the way she saw fit - which was to include some of the, at the time, conflicts and problems that North America was facing. She chose to give her own little touch to the bigger historical perspective.

--------------------------------------------
[ 1 ]. Page 8, line 5
[ 2 ]. Page 8, line 9
[ 3 ]. Page 8, line 38-39.