I descended into the cavernous belly of the New York City subway system last week and waited on the platform for the R train to come — an experience akin to waiting for the Virgin Mary to appear in a grotto: Maybe she will (inspiring us to rejoice), or maybe she won’t (a cause of great sorrow).
“D, R, and N trains are experiencing delays,” intoned the algorithmic voice of the MTA for the third time. Sweat trickled down my forehead and seeped into my shirt. The stench of garbage wafted through the air as rats weaved in and out of the tracks.
Modern technology had rendered the nave more suitable for meatpacking than meditation. Our Lady of Perpetual Help had become Our Lady of Perpetual Refrigeration.
Then the light of the train peeked through the tunnel. I breathed a sigh of relief, thankful for my imminent deliverance from the hell of the platform.
Shivering in eternal shade
A blast of arctic air greeted me as I stepped into the train car. The wet spots on my shirt began to freeze, sending me into a fit of shivers. I recalled that the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno is not burning hot but rather freezing cold.
I was staving off hypothermia by the time I reached my stop. As I waded into the dank, putrid heat of the station, my intestines began doing tricks and turns. The frenetic shifts in temperature seemed to be causing my nervous system to short-circuit.
Finally I reached my destination: a pleasant cafe where I intended to get some writing done. A fresh bout of shivering shattered my focus; astonishingly, the temperature in the cafe was even lower than in the subway car.
Foul abuse the wretch poured out
No sooner did I take a sip of my latte than I was interrupted by another alert of sorts, one decidedly more intimate and urgent than the one about the R train. I obtained the bathroom code from the barista in the nick of time.
Once restored to gastrointestinal equilibrium, I remembered that I had a light jacket at the bottom of my bag, buried somewhere beneath my books, laptop, chargers, cigarettes, essential oils, and Benadryl. I retrieved it, wrapped it over my body, and began writing again.
But it was no use — the thin fabric offered little protection against the wintry chill. Reasoning that heatstroke was preferable to freezing to death, I decided to move to a table outside.
Plunged down from heaven’s height
It was still hot out when I made my way to evening Mass. Nonetheless, I naively hoped that a Christian spirit of moderation and poverty would prevail in the house of God. Perhaps some simple oscillating fans and a few open windows?
It was not to be. Modern technology had rendered the nave more suitable for meatpacking than meditation. Our Lady of Perpetual Help had become Our Lady of Perpetual Refrigeration.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the moderate use of technology to make the climate indoors more tolerable — especially for the elderly and those with fragile health. But this was overkill, an example of our tendency to blast air conditioning without regard to the needs of the people inhabiting the space — or whether the space has any inhabitants to begin with.
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O.W. Root
Arm your soul against all dread
The French writer Jean Baudrillard noted this tendency nearly 30 years ago. In his 1986 travelogue “America,” he finds himself both scandalized and seduced by the “mindless luxury” he encounters. “The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them.”
These days, I’m leaning toward “demented,” if not demonic. I hesitate to use the phrase “playing God,” but isn’t there something hubristic about our determination to eradicate all sensation of summer from our indoor spaces?
It is for this reason that I declare a crusade against air conditioning.
Note that I’m not advocating seizing the nearest CVS from the HVAC infidels and claiming it for piously perspiring Christendom. The battle we face is primarily within, against a certain spiritual malaise brought on by our relentless pursuit of comfort.
Consumerism compels us to create “needs” that don’t actually correspond with the good of our bodies and souls, needs that — in reality — often prove detrimental. The compulsion to maintain a certain ideal temperature at all times falls under this category.
To ascend into the shining world again
Baudrillard goes so far as to say that we seek nothing less than the “air-conditioning of life,” a state in which everything is processed, consumed, and “at last digested and turned into the same homogeneous faecal matter.” Cory Doctorow’s memorable term for this is “ens**ttification.” Perhaps that explains my volatile digestive system.
The late Pope Francis singled out our obsession with climate control in his 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si’.”
“People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity,” he notes, “but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning.”
It’s a shame that Pope Francis didn’t go farther in his condemnation of air conditioning, choosing instead to focus on vices like tobacco (the sale of which he banned in the Vatican) and the Tridentine Latin Mass.
I can only pray that God has delivered Francis from the extremes of both cold and heat our earthly bodies are subject to and into the kingdom where the thermostat never needs adjusting.