The Problem

Krystal is baffled. He can recall how it used to be, for himself, but also for the culture. He cites Anatole Broyard's fond recollection of his Greenwich Village days: "Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn't simply read books; we became them." And the implication is clear: He is not the only one to have lost his faith. The youthful adoration of reading is like young love; growing up means growing away from immoderate intensities.

 

Privacy

"the integrity of once private and powerful emotions has been cheapened by the nature and volume of our public discourse." Updike asserts: "There is an eroding of the private self. I think we're scared, of course, of silence. And now we have the technology to surround ourselves with noise all the time. I think it means a lessening not only of our religious lives, such as they are, but even of our emotional lives." I believe, further, that the romantic is very closely tied to the private, and that it is this, the private, that is threatened with eradication, not just by the myriad electronic circuits we have woven into the fabric of our lives, but also by the collective mind-state that upholds circuited interconnectedness as ultimately desirable. And what is privacy? It is, for me, the sheath of solitude we all receive in order that the self might relax into its natural proportions. It is the silence and removal we all must have at times if we are to hear and heed our inner promptings. The fading of the importance of reading, as Krystal represents it, is only one consequence of the erosion of our privacy.

 

Language

"Romantic," as we all know, is one of the soft words in our cultural lexicon. Other soft words include "soul," "spirit," "sensibility," "inwardness," "poetic," and perhaps even "meaning." All are words formerly of high estate that have been depreciated, rendered old-fashioned, and removed to the sidelines by the rapidly mutating conditions of contemporary life. They are words that cannot stand unshielded in the magnesium glare of empirical reason. They are words that a user tends to inflect ironically or mark off with tone quotes so that others will know that they are not being offered up as legitimate currency. No one I know would openly repudiate the ideal of wisdom, say, or of tradition, or cultivation. Not repudiate, no. But more than a few would, I suspect, arch their brows as if to say, "Come on . . ." And it's true, isn't it, these are more soft words, words that only politicians and preachers can speak without ironic inflection or tell-tale pause?

 

Prestige of Reading

the condition of our intellectual—our readerly—life has as much to do with the attitudes of non-readers as anything else; that in former times non-readers at least paid homage to the world of books, certified its importance, whereas now, much more often, they live out their lives in utter indifference, if not a kind of defensive contempt.

 

Subjectivity

Both private reading and contemplation and the larger public circulation of ideas and responses—these appear to have ebbed significantly. In the case of former readers this suggests a changed relation between self and world. Rather, a whole array of forces working through our society is changing the deep patterns of how people behave in public and private; is modifying, further, their sense of self, and dissipating subjectivity. One consequence of this—and there are many others—is a loss of interest in and will for reading. The self of the future may indeed be a decentered entity, liberated from the isolation that once pressed in the warps and wrinkles of eccentric subjectivity, enabled through omnipresent circuitries to distribute itself through systems and networks.