The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

Nostalgia is immediate, and tends to be more localized.

Ten, fifteen years from now the world will be nothing like what we remember, nothing much like what we experience now. We will still wear clothes and live in dwellings, but

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.

Reading is not on a continuum with the other bodily or cognitive acts. It instigates a shift, a change of state—a change analogous to, but not as totally affecting as, the change from wakefulness to sleep.

As the world hurtles on toward its mysterious rendezvous, the old act of slowly reading a serious book becomes an elegiac exercise.

the original question remains: What does this steadily throbbing shimmer hold for us? How is it revising our ideas about the larger human project? What continuities remain, and how do we contend—collectively and individually—with all the breaks and rifts, all the spots where traditions can no longer carry us over?

The soul needs silence, time, and concentration—precisely what is required by the counter-technology of the book.

If a person turns from print—finding it too slow, too hard, irrelevant to the excitements of the present—then what happens to that person’s sense of culture and continuity?

Wisdom has nothing to do with the gathering or organizing of facts—this is basic. Wisdom is a seeing through facts, a penetration to the underlying laws and patterns.