updated 23d ago
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
Works of imagination bleed together with the world they extrapolate from. The writing process begins in the writer, the life; it branches off onto paper, into artifice; but the final restless resting place of every written thing is the solitary life of the reader. There it hibernates, a cluster of stray images, forgotten incitements and conversatio
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our relation to the space-time axis will be very different from what we have lived with for millennia. We will be swimming in impulses and data—the microchip will make us offers that will be very hard to refuse.
from The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts
Just as most of what happens to us dissolves, becomes part of an inner compost known in generalized terms—“my high school years,” “boot camp,” and so on—so most of what we have read loses definition and becomes a blurry wash.
from The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts
A finely filamented electronic scrim has slipped between ourselves and the so-called “outside world.” The idea of spending a day, never mind a week, out of the range of all our devices sounds bold, even risky.
from The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts
For while it can be many things, serious reading is above all an agency of self-making.
from The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts
Kojo added 23d ago
The triumph of the digital seems to have also brought the triumph of the factual. As literature, as the idea of literature, suffers depreciation, it gets ever harder to make the case for imagination. And what is imagination if not the animating power of inwardness? The subjective self takes in the world and fashions meaning; art and religion are it
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A page was a field studded with tantalizing signs and a book was a vast play structure riddled with openings and crevices I could get inside.
from The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts
At any and every moment, our actions, our emotional disposition, our thoughts, our will all combine into what another person might experience as our presence. At earlier stages of history, before the advent of the sense-extending technologies, human interactions were necessarily carried out face to face, presence to presence. Before the telephone a
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A reader in the full flush of absorption will not be aware of turning words into mental entities. The conversion is automatic, as unconscious as highway driving. We often don’t register what we are doing for pages at a time. In this peculiar condition, a misprinted word can be as suddenly jarring as the sight of a hubcap rolling toward us down the
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As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise.
from The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts
Kojo added 23d ago