If you take all of our technological innovations of the past two decades—certainly those in the fields of computing and communications—you cannot fail to see that their collective tendency is to breach the wall of isolated selfhood and to swamp us

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

If I were writing the same essays now, I would lay much more stress on the fact that all our new technologies affect us in tandem. They modify our reflexes and expectations at the same time that they wrap us up in an invisible fabric—like the one that the fabled Emperor wore, only this fabric is strangely actual, and capable of obscuring the

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

Aura, like soul, is one of those terms that are easy to intuitively catch the sense of, but very hard to define satisfactorily. The aura is the uniqueness, the presence, the natural emanation of a thing—its spirit.

Soul—a vast, elusive word, and I need to be careful not to use it indiscriminately. What do I mean by it? Although I don’t want to rule out its religious sense, I am not using it, as believers have for centuries, to designate the part of ourselves that is held to be immortal. My use of soul is secular. I mean it to stand for inwardness, for that

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

The adaptation changes us. We respond to the explosion of signals, the demand it creates, by fragmenting ourselves; we learn to delegate our attention in many directions at once, in controlled allotments. Multitasking, we call it. It’s amazing how quickly we’ve accustomed ourselves to this self-partitioning, to the point where any sustained focus

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.