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.

Nostalgia is immediate, and tends to be more localized.

Only part of this great change impinges directly upon the literary enterprise. But the overall rescripting of all societal premises is bound to affect reading and writing immensely. The formerly stable system—the axis with writer at one end, editor, publisher, and bookseller in the middle, and reader at the other end—is slowly being bent into a pre

Loss of the opposition becomes, in effect, a loss of polarity, and a loss of mystery. Not so much the mystery of unknown things, of the next scientific horizon, but the underscored mystery of self, of being.

The disinclination I feel about the digital future is stronger, more certain, but the fear grows from the same root. I see the situation in Faustian terms, as an either/or. To embrace the microchip and all its magic would be to close myself off from a great many habits and attitudes, ones that define me to myself; I would have to reposition myself

ideas are not the sum and substance of thought; rather, thought is as much about the motion across the water as it is about the stepping stones that allow it.

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

We all feel a desire for connection, for meaning, but we don’t seem to know what to connect with what, and we are utterly at sea about our place as individuals in the world at large.

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.