the cultic animal

I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people-maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range....

It’s the print. That’s the problem. It’s the book. It’s the object itself. To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities....

I don’t think the Kindle will make any difference to what I’m talking about, which is that the book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen and it can’t compete with the computer screen I don’t think. And now we have all those screens so against all those screens I think the book can’t measure up.

---Philip Roth.

'We no longer use a spread-out substantial picture of the manifold virtues of man and society. We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as brave, naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world. For the hard idea of truth we have substituted a facile idea of sincerity...

We have never had...a satisfactory liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn'

--Iris M. ("Against Dryness")

Well, yes, 'the end of the novel' is, perhaps, only second favourite to 'the end of the west'..the 'west' begins with an awareness of its own end, is rooted in contingency, scepticism toward the facile attempts to seek permanence, surety. Cosmos, Nature, God, and eventually reason itself must give way.

What will be lost? That's the question. A narrowing down, a greying of the imagination, as if one were looking at faint lines on an empty canvas? A turn of phrase...how a phrase turns you, or summarizes layers of thought & feeling, eventually only to concede to the realm of facts, thought, light.

Pleasure, uselessness, and slowness as a form of resistance against the manufactured restlessness and strivings of an image-ridden commercial society. Snobbishness and terrible pretentiousness. Of course. But that presumes an 'other, and you like to read for yourself. Silence as a commons, the preference for preferring not to. Already 'preference' is the wrong word.

Second thoughts: there's something peculiar about always being attentive, something suspect about self-absorption.