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

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.

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

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.

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.

The primary human relations—to space, time, nature, and to other people—have been subjected to a warping pressure that is something new under the sun. Those who argue that the very nature of history is change—that change is constant—are missing the point. Our era has seen an escalation of the rate of change so drastic that all possibilities of evol

Writing is the monumentally complex operation whereby experience, insight, and imagination are distilled into language; reading is the equally complex operation that disperses these distilled elements into another person’s life.

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

in an element of connectedness.