In a second passage in Surprised by Joy Lewis targets newspaper reading, mocking the falsity of the desire to be up to date, which he labeled an “appalling waste of time and spirit.” Those who do read the newspaper acquire “an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.”2 With age, Lewis grew more and more pessimistic about modernity, how it tends to “annihilate space” and increase in speed,3 melt down
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