Words&Dirt

“Everything speaks in its own way.”

––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 123

“A few years ago I began thinking that the bookish people of the world were becoming a little bit like medieval monks, living austere but intellectually complex lives in voluntary seclusion from a gaudy and action-packed secular world. I’ve written a novel, Anathem, based on that premise.

It’s paradoxical, I suppose, to write a long book about how no one reads long books any more: an ambiguity I’ll have a hard time explaining on talk shows.

If bookishness were just a niche pastime, like stamp collecting or waveboarding, none of this would really matter. But it’s more than that. It is the collective memory and the accumulated wisdom of our species.

The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them. When all things bookish are edited out of public discourse, strange things happen, or seem to. When our societal attention span becomes shorter than the lifetime of a steel bridge over a river, what appears to be a solid strip of highway can suddenly fall out from under us. Like a portent from the medieval world.”

–– “Time Magazine Article About Anathem,” Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing, by Neal Stephenson, pg. 270