The New Romantics

“People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.”

We live in an age of lexical abundance. More words, more access, more content than at any time in human history. And yet something essential is slipping away. Not reading itself, but the kind of reading that once shaped minds and formed character: slow, immersive, reflective, and richly human. As Harold Bloom noted: “"We read deeply for varied... See more

I contend that the creator is an individual who manages a most formidable challenge: to wed the most advanced understandings achieved in a domain with the kinds of problems, questions, issues, and sensibilities that most characterized his or her life as a wonder-filled child.

It is a mistake and a misreading of nature to think that you, a living creature, will be flourishing all the days of your life.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a concept in quantum mechanics. It tells us that what we measure determines what we observe. And what we observe determines the nature of reality.

This is the bottom line : if we don’t make room for deliberate play, we’ll burn out under the weight of seriousness we’ve forced upon our own shoulders.

Roland Allen’s The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . Allen points out that “people often start diaries in times of upheaval,”

The point Klinenberg wanted to make was this: If there was no such thing as a library, and someone proposed it today, there's a 99.9% chance they and their “radical and crazy idea” would be laughed out of the room.

But, as we know, it’s not a crazy idea.