When the first sequel to “The Matrix” appeared, I found myself in a familiar place: out in the dark. I hadn’t heard of the movie. The fact that it had achieved iconic status, that it represented a seismic cultural event, that it had profoundly altered the human experience — all this had passed me by.

Ashamed of my ignorance and lack of engagement in the contemporary world, I rented the original in videotape form, though there are few things I’d rather do less than watch a movie at home on the television screen.

For the benefit of the pitiful few who may not know it, the premise of “The Matrix” is that the world has been taken over by evil computers, and that what we take for reality is composed of images they pipe into our comatose brains.

According to an essay by Adam Gopnik, “The Matrix’s” conceit has historical antecedents, including a belief of the medieval Cathars that the material world is “a phantasm created by Satan” to keep human beings in a state of slavery. But the ultimate father of this mindset was Plato, who thought that the world we experience through our senses is but a vague, inferior copy of an ideal — the real, real world.

The platonic point of view has had enormous appeal and has inspired no end of charismatic leaders who have promised to lead us to utopia, asking only that we surrender our wills and perhaps our lives to their grand visions. It helps explain the part of our nature that instinctively seeks salvation in metaphysical realms, even though they can’t be verified in the here and now and must be accepted on faith.

Like so much of our entertainment today, “The Matrix” turned out to be pretty silly. Let me embellish on that. It was shallow, tedious, puerile, a pretentious cartoon fabrication with all the depth of a video game. The contemporary audience is apparently happy with this sort of fare, as long as bodies fly miraculously through the air, execute martial arts moves and blast one another with automatic weapons.

What did strike me about “The Matrix,” however, was the absence of nature from the film. Almost all the action takes place within claustrophobic walls. I don’t remember seeing a single tree, bird or cloud.

The hero, Neo, is cast as “The One” who will deliver humanity from its bondage to the sinister machines. But no rivers, oceans, mountains or jungles offer him avenues of escape. The ruined skyline of a city is projected as an image of loss. But there’s no suggestion of a lost Eden where Neo and his freedom fighters can flee the traps man has set for himself, rediscover their true selves or find some kind of redemption.

Nature was once a refuge in the American imagination. When Ishmael feels “grim about the mouth,” he takes to sea. Oppressed by “sivilization,” Huck Finn “lights out for the territory.” Westerns used to glory in the wide open spaces. But the landscape of today’s movies is mostly indoors and manmade. The wilderness has vanished. Doomsday weapons, conveyances that travel at the speed of light, shrine-like rooms filled with omniscient computers — such are the conventions that excite our awe.

“The Matrix” was right about our plugged-in lives. We’re controlled by gadgets. We don’t feel alive unless we’re “connected” to the Internet or yammering on our cell phone. The real “matrix” is the entertainment industry, the real bondage our constant need to be entertained. Five hundred channels, a television in every room and even in some cars. Some people are closer to sitcom characters than to family and friends.

A steady supply of noise has become as necessary as oxygen to us. We dare not step outside without earphones clamped on our ears. More than anything, we dread a moment of silence, a moment to communicate with our inner selves.

The plugged-in life contributes to our estrangement from nature. A couple of Halloweens ago, a vast migration of snow geese passed over town. Illuminated by the lights of Lawrence, they circled above on spectral wings, raising a din of honking. It was one of nature’s marvels. But the little ghosts and goblins and their adult escorts didn’t seem to notice. The geese didn’t have Disney personalities. They weren’t performing on a screen.

Does a perfect, ideal world hover beyond us? I keep an open mind. The devil is certainly busy in this one. But the lure of utopia will never make me anxious to leave “this mangled, smutted, demi-world.” The older I get the more I value the harsh seasons of imperfect Kansas, the more I’m charmed by its emptiness.

Before I’d pack my bags for Shangri-La, I’d want to know if I’d be permitted to begin the days there, walking down a gravel drive with my dogs to fetch the paper when the yellow and orange banners appear on my neighbor’s hilltop, heralding the sun. Simple pleasures are more than enough.

As for entertainment, I’m happy with a ragged line of geese flying low above Coal Creek, a valley of trees with branches of ice, with shrubs that can transform themselves into a deer, leaping and showing their flags. That’s my idea of “special effects.”

Like most people, I nurse a hope that I’ll be able to take a few such impressions with me when my time to cross the river comes. Sometimes I even find myself standing close to the hog pen and breathing deeply. The aroma nearly knocks me over, but I savor it, because it’s real.

– George Gurley, who lives in rural Baldwin, writes a regular column for the Journal-World.