Recent reading spans the antique past, the televisual present, and everything in between.
Alexandra Gold has a brilliant, perceptive piece on “Every Second Counts,” the contronymic catchphrase of The Bear, in the LA Review of Books.
In the TLS, Nick Lowe writes beautifully, and rigorously, about the Iliad. He adapts from Robin Lane Fox “a stunning, perhaps stunningly obvious, thought: what if the Iliad is able to be all these things for us precisely because we have lost the power to understand the processes of mind and world that made it possible?”—which reminds me of Stephen Greenblatt on the “strategic opacity” of Shakespeare, a more deliberate exploitation of the literary power of incomprehension.
I can neither endorse nor refute Lowe’s critique of the line breaks in Emily Wilson’s Iliad, but I enjoyed the brief illusion of inside knowledge.1
Also beyond my expertise to judge is David Samuels’ contribution to an established genre: essays on how the internet is changing us. Samuels goes unusually deep into the history of how reading shapes our sense of who we are, drawing on work by the historian Paul Saenger.
Today, we celebrate the Renaissance as the moment when the power of the individual consciousness began to gain significant traction against the desire of the Church to stand as the sole legitimate arbiter of truth. Reading helped to open up the inner spaces in which men and women could think independently about their own lives and their place in the universe. As a consequence, we have come to think of those inner spaces, as figured through the act of silent reading, as the places where a significant part of our humanity resides.
What sort of reading will survive the internet, where silent communion morphs into distracted skimming?
If the spread of printing presses, combined with the spread of cheap hand-held mirrors, made available to millions of people a new sense of themselves as individuals, and as the authors of their own stories, which were inherently worth reading about and listening to, we can only wonder at the power inherent in billions of iPhones and other smartphone devices which combine a printing press, in the form of access to social media platforms, and a mirror, in the form of ever-more-powerful smartphone cameras, with which users endlessly record and broadcast selfies. Network billions of these mirrors together, and put them in real-time communication with each other, and it seems clear that we are looking at a species of transformative, technologically driven change that reaches deeper inside our heads and hearts and moves at a far greater velocity than anything human civilizations have ever experienced.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Samuels is pessimistic about this change, which “should not strike any sane observer as a hopeful or desirable development.” It’s a commonplace that each new media technology sparks dystopian fears—radio, comic books, TV—but the fact that past fears were misplaced or overblown doesn’t mean that Samuels will be wrong.
For a rejoinder, see the letters page of the subsequent TLS.
Thanks for sharing that, Kieran. Need to print it out in order to read it properly. Reminded me of Illich:
"In the train of my thoughts, I am aware of the parentheses, the italics, the paragraphs, the need for a footnote here, an idea out of the bibliography there. In the plans I have for this next semester, some periods are blocked out, others underlined...When I tell you my thoughts, it's as if I were reading them off from inside me. To an alarming degree, the structure of the page is the outline of my thoughts, plans and memories. My experience is biblionomic; I have become a biblionome.
Even in the liveliest and most intimate conversations, I am reminded of books next to the faces of people. I know where a certain book stands, I remember its size and type face exactly. I know I got an idea I'm discussing in a paragraph on a right-hand page, somewhere in the lower third. As with a colleague whose mustache I remember before I can hit on his name, so with the color of a book's binding before I can bring up its title.
Again and again, a page will serve to orient me. I continually turn to a page, and am turned on by a page. All this make me a bibliotrope."
Which reminds me: really must finish his 'Vineyard' in the hols.
Hope all is well.
p. s. Started a very interesting book that you might like as well: Inventing Socrates, by Miles Hollingworth.