Most children inhabit a totally plastic and fully alive world. Language is brand new, and delightfully fun. Kids love to speak it backwards, in Pig Latin, to distort its meaning in code. Cold weather lets them mark their own breath. Through its youngest speakers, language gets refreshed. But, like an incoming tide, daily life erodes and erases the transcendent. The world moves faster and faster. We sprout tin ears. Language fades.

Maria meditated. She sat still and she meditated. These days, there is not much chance for meditation – actual or metaphoric. There’s just too much movement; we’re awash in movement – extreme, virtual movement at that, directed at and delivered most effectively and efficiently at the youngest audiences, by electronic technology, in video games, Game Boys, computers and TV. In my country, to make kids sit still, doctors prescribe drugs, the sedative of choice is Ritalin. I am interested in looking at the extreme edge of this kind of movement, a brand of virtual movement that electronic technology has whipped into a frenzy, and that goes by the name of excitement. Under such conditions, stillness is impossible; and meditative stillness is absolutely essential, at certain moments, for true literacy.

Let me first say something about the oddity of the word, and why I have settled on it. Excite derives from Latin excitare, to awaken, to call forth, instigate, set in motion. The word has no antecedent in Anglo-Saxon, appearing for the first time, in English, in the fourteenth century, as a decidedly religious term, in a kind of mystical grammatical construction: “The singing of the psalms excites the angels to our help.” The angels get sung into being. They wing our way on a melody of our making. From that early use of the word, as a verb, excite gets taken over by the Scientific Revolution, turned into a noun, excitation, to describe a state of electrical or magnetic attraction.

Through analogy, the word moves, in the seventeenth century, to physiology. First used by Shakespeare, excitement comes tinged with a sense of aberrant behaviour. Hamlet utters it in this new sense, in the fourth act, fourth scene, of his play: “How stand I then, that have father killed, a mother stained, Excitements of my reason, and my blood.”