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

For while it can be many things, serious reading is above all an agency of self-making.

To say that we are really reading only while our eyes are in motion, only while we are directly under the spell of the language, voicing the words to ourselves, is tantamount to saying that the writer is only writing while he or she is actively putting words onto paper.

Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don’t just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity.

Our passage into bright contemporaneity has carried a price: The more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth.

Soul is our inwardness, our self-reflectiveness, our orientation to the unknown. Soul waxes in private, wanes in public. We feel it, or feel through it, when we are in sacral spaces, when we love, when we respond to natural or artistic beauty. Soul may be elicited in many ways. We comprehend it unthinkingly—we either know it as a resonance, a prese

We inhabit what writer George W. S. Trow has christened “the context of no context.”

Our reading memory in many ways echoes our experiential memory, but with one crucial difference: Experiential memory is of actual people, places, and things, whereas our reading memory is of those things as we have been induced to create them in our own minds.

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 difference between the epoch of early modernity and the present is, to simplify drastically, that formerly the body had time to accept the graft, the new organ, whereas now we are hurtling forward willy-nilly, assuming that if a technology is connected with communications or information processing it must be good, we must need it—and that we ha

READING: THE TERM is as generous and imprecise as “love.” So often it means more than just the word-by-word deciphering of the printed page.