The Gutenberg Elegies Quotes

“I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny...the time of reading, the time defined by the author's language resonating in the self, is not the world's time, but the soul's. The energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered. The free-floating self--the self we diffusely commune with while driving or walking or puttering in the kitchen--is enlisted in the work of bringing the narrative to life. In the process, we are able to shake off the habitual burden of insufficient meaning and flex our deeper natures.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away from ourselves.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in more that I value the specific contents.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“To read, when one does so of one's own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and to set off toward it.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“It is in adolescence that most of us grasp that life--our own life--is a problem to be solved, that a set of personal unknowns must now be factored together with the frightening variables of experience. The future suddenly appears--it is the space upon which the answers will be inscribed.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“My core fear is that we are, as a culture, as a species, becoming shallower; that we have turned from depth--from the Judeo-Christian premise of unfathomable mystery--and are adapting ourselves to the ersatz security of a vast lateral consciousness. That we are giving up on wisdom, the struggle for which has for millennia been central to the very idea of culture, and that we are pledging instead to a faith in the web. What is our idea, our ideal, of wisdom these days? Who represents it? Who even invokes it? Our postmodern culture is a vast fabric of completing isms; we are leaderless and subject to the terrors, masked as the freedoms, of an absolute relativism. It would be wrong to lay all the blame at the feet of technology, but more wrong to ignore the great transformative impact of new technological systems--to act as if it's all just business as usual.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“If literature is to survive, to gain back some of the power it has ceded to terrorists and newsmakers of all descriptions, it must become dangerous.”
― Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age