https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/08/reading-in-the-age-of-constant-distraction/
Johan Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Laesende lille pige, 1900
“I read books to read myself,” Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.
Birkerts’s book, which turns twenty-five this year, is composed of
fifteen essays on reading, the self, the convergence of the two, and the
ways both are threatened by the encroachment of modern technology. As
the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s
arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by
print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of
individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the
facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the
centuries and cosmos. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that
can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” he wrote. “It is a
participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our
customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and surficiality,
into the realm of duration.”
Writing in 1994, Birkerts worried that distractedness and
surficiality would win out. The “duration state” we enter through a
turned page would be lost in a world of increasing speed and relentless
connectivity, and with it our ability to make meaning out of narratives,
both fictional and lived. The diminishment of literature—of sustained
reading, of writing as the product of a single focused mind—would
diminish the self in turn, rendering us less and less able to grasp both
the breadth of our world and the depth of our own consciousness. For
Birkerts, as for many a reader, the thought of such a loss devastates.
So while he could imagine this bleak near-future, he (mostly) resisted
the masochistic urge to envision it too concretely, focusing instead on
the present, in which—for a little while longer, at least—he reads, and
he writes. His collection, despite its title, resembles less an elegy
for literature than an attempt to stave off its death: by writing
eloquently about his own reading life and electronic resistance,
Birkerts reminds us that such a life is worthwhile, desirable, and, most
importantly, still possible. In the face of what we stand to lose, he
privileges what we might yet gain.
A quarter of a century later, did he—did we—manage to salvage the
wreck? Or have Birkerts’s worst fears come to pass? It’s hard to tell
from the numbers. More independent bookstores are opening than closing, and sales of print books are up—but authors’ earnings are down. Fewer Americans read for pleasure than they once did. A major house’s editor-driven imprint was shuttered recently, while the serialized storytelling app Wattpad announced
its intention to publish books chosen by algorithms, foregoing the need
for editors altogether. Some of the changes Birkerts saw on the
horizon—the invention of e-books, for one, and the possibilities of
hypertext—have turned out to be less consequential than anticipated, but
others have proven dire; the easy, addictive distractions of the screen
swallow our hours whole.
And perhaps the greatest danger posed to literature is not any
newfangled technology or whiz-bang rearrangement of our synapses, but
plain old human greed in its latest, greatest iteration: an online
retailer incorporated in the same year The Gutenberg Elegies
was published. In the last twenty-five years, Amazon has gorged on late
capitalism’s values of ease and cheapness, threatening to monopolize not
only the book world, but the world-world. In the face of such an
insidious, omnivorous menace—not merely the tech giant, but the culture
that created and sustains it—I find it difficult to disentangle my own
fear about the future of books from my fear about the futures of
small-town economies, of American democracy, of the earth and its rising
seas.
“Ten, fifteen years from now the world will be nothing like what we
remember, nothing much like what we experience now,” Birkerts wrote. “We
will be swimming in impulses and data—the microchip will make us offers
that will be very hard to refuse.” Indeed, few of us have refused them.
As each new technology, from smartphones to voice-activated home
assistants, becomes normalized faster and faster, our ability to refuse
it lessens. The choice presented in The Gutenberg Elegies,
between embrace and skepticism, hardly seems like a choice anymore: the
new generation is born swaddled in the digital world’s many arms.
I am both part and not part of this new generation. I was born in
1988, two years before the development of HTML. I didn’t have a computer
at home until middle school, didn’t have a cell phone until I was
eighteen. I remember the pained beeping of a dial-up connection, if only
faintly. Facebook launched as I finished up high school, and Twitter as
I entered college. The golden hours of my childhood aligned perfectly
with the fading light of a pre-internet world; I know intimately that
such a world existed, and had its advantages.
Birkerts, recalling the power books held over him when he was young,
writes, “Through reading and living I have gradually made myself proof
against total ravishment by authors. Yet so vivid are my recollections
of that urgency, that sense of consequence, that I foolishly keep
looking for it to happen again.” The heightened state brought on by a
book—in which one is “actively present at every moment, scripting and
constructing”—is what readers seek, Birkerts argues: “They want plot and
character, sure, but what they really want is a vehicle that will bear
them off to the reading state.” This state is threatened by the
ever-sprawling internet—can the book’s promise of deeper presence entice
us away from the instant gratification of likes and shares?
“[Y]ears of working in bookstores have convinced me that this
fundamental condition is there for others as well,” Birkerts writes; as a
young man, he worked for a then-independent Ann Arbor bookshop called
Borders. Four decades later, I slung books at Literati Bookstore, a few
blocks away. The shelves of the original Borders had been bought and
repurposed by Literati’s owners to hold the new store’s fiction section,
and the people browsing them were the same, too: that is, they had the
same tilt to their heads as they scanned titles, the same hopeful reach
in their fingers as they pulled a volume down, flipping through the
first few pages.
And if they occasionally wanted books modeled after the internet—gift
books born on Tumblr, Instagram printed out and bound—they also wanted
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. They wanted Teju Cole’s Open City, Anthony Marra’s The Tsar of Love and Techno, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely.
Loneliness is what the internet and social media claim to alleviate,
though they often have the opposite effect. Communion can be hard to
find, not because we aren’t occupying the same physical space but
because we aren’t occupying the same mental plane: we don’t read the
same news; we don’t even revel in the same memes. Our phones and
computers deliver unto each of us a personalized—or rather,
algorithm-realized—distillation of headlines, anecdotes, jokes, and
photographs. Even the ads we scroll past are not the same as our
neighbor’s: a pair of boots has followed me from site to site for weeks.
We call this endless, immaterial material a feed, though there’s little sustenance to be found.
Birkerts’s argument (and mine) isn’t that books alleviate loneliness,
either: to claim a goal shared by every last app and website is to lose
the fight for literature before it starts. No, the power of art—and
many books are, still, art, not entertainment—lies in the way it turns
us inward and outward, all at once. The communion we seek, scanning
titles or turning pages, is not with others—not even the others, living
or long dead, who wrote the words we read—but with ourselves. Our finest
capacities, too easily forgotten.
Early in The Gutenberg Elegies, Birkerts summarizes
historian Rolf Engelsing’s definition of reading “intensively” as the
common practice of most readers before the nineteenth century, when
books, which were scarce and expensive, were often read aloud and many
times over. As reading materials—not just books, but newspapers,
magazines, and ephemera—proliferated, more recent centuries saw the rise
of reading “extensively”: we read these materials once, often quickly,
and move on. Birkerts coins his own terms: the deep, devotional practice
of “vertical” reading has been supplanted by “horizontal” reading,
skimming along the surface. This shift has only accelerated dizzyingly
in the time since Engelsing wrote in 1974, since Birkerts wrote in 1994,
and since I wrote, yesterday, the paragraph above.
Horizontal reading rules the day. What I do when I look at Twitter is
less akin to reading a book than to the encounter I have with a
recipe’s instructions or the fine print of a receipt: I’m taking in
information, not enlightenment. It’s a way to pass the time, not to live
in it. Reading—real reading, the kind Birkerts makes his impassioned
case for—draws on our vertical sensibility, however latent, and “where
it does not assume depth, it creates it.”
I no longer have a Facebook account, and I find myself spending less
and less time online. As adulthood settles on me—no passing fad, it
turns out, but a chronic condition—I’m increasingly drawn back to the
deeply engaged reading of my childhood. The books have changed, and my
absorption is not always as total as it once was, but I can still find,
slipped like a note between the pages, what Birkerts calls the “time of
the self… deep time, duration time, time that is essentially
characterized by our obliviousness to it.” The gift of reading, the gift
of any encounter with art, is that this time spent doesn’t leave me
when I lift my eyes from the book in my lap: it lingers, for a minute or
a day. “[S]omething more than definitional slackness allows me to tell a
friend that I’m reading The Good Soldier as we walk down the street together,” Birkerts writes. “In some ways I am reading the novel as I walk, or nap, or drive to the store for milk.”
Unfortunately, this thrumming-under quality is also true of our
horizontal reading. If I’ve spent too long before the pixelated page,
that experience, too, clings to the hours that follow. The screen
appears before my closed eyes; my thoughts vibrate at the frequency of content, of discourse:
pithy, argumentative, living in anticipation of retort. I debate
imagined trolls in the shower. “When a work compels immersion, if often
also has the power to haunt from a distance,” Birkerts says, and how I
wish this haunting were the sole province of great work. It isn’t:
ghosts seep through the words on the screen, ghosts of screeds and
inanities, of hate and idiocy, of so much—so much!—bad writing.
“But perhaps when the need is strong enough we will seek out the word
on the page, and the work that puts us back into the force field of
deep time,” says Birkerts. “The book—and my optimism, you may sense, is
not unwavering—will be seen as a haven, as a way of going off-line and
into a space sanctified by subjectivity.” Oddly enough, here in the
dawning days of 2019, my own optimism is strong. It seems clear to me
that the need is strong enough—is as strong as it always has been and
always will be—for the blossoming, bodily pleasure of reading something
remarkable, the way it takes the top of my head off and shows me—palms
open, an offering—what’s been churning away in there, all along.
“Resonance—there is no wisdom without it,” Birkerts writes.
“Resonance is a natural phenomenon, the shadow of import alongside the
body of fact, and it cannot flourish except in deep time.” But time
feels especially shallow these days, as the wave of one horror barely
crests before it’s devoured by the next, as every morning’s shocking
headline is old news by the afternoon. Weeks go by, and we might see
friends only through the funhouse mirrors of Snapchat and Instagram and
their so-called stories, designed to disappear. Not even the pretense of
permanence remains: we refresh and refresh every tab, and are not
sated. What are we waiting for? What are we hoping to find?
We know perfectly well—we remember, even if dimly, the inward state
that satisfies more than our itching, clicking fingers—and we know it
isn’t here. Here, on the internet, is a nowhere space, a
shallow time. It is a flat and impenetrable surface. But with a book, we
dive in; we are sucked in; we are immersed, body and soul. “We hold in
our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times,” Birkerts
assures. “We can resist the skimming tendency and delve; we can restore,
if only for a time, the vanishing assumption of coherence. The beauty
of the vertical engagement is that it does not have to argue for itself.
It is self-contained, a fulfillment.”
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