p. 10 The organ with which we observe and make sense of the universe is, by a comfortable margin, the most complex object we know of in that universe.
p. 11 Alzheimer’s is a disease of classically “insidious onset.” Since even healthy people become more forgetful as they age, there’s no way to pinpoint the first memory to fall victim to it.
p. 32 Plato’s description of writing, in the Phadreus, as a “crutch of memory” seems to me fully accurate: I couldn’t tell a clear story of my father without those letters. But, where Plato laments the decline of the oral tradition and the atrophy of memory which writing induces, I at the other end of the Age of the Written Word am impressed by the sturdiness and reliability of words on paper. My mother’s letters are truer and more complete than my self-absorbed and biased memories; she’s more alive to me in the written phrase “he NEEDS distractions!” than in hours of videotape or stacks of pictures of her.
p. 35 There’s no way to know if he recognized my voice, but within minutes of my arrival his blood pressure climbed to 120/90. I worried then, worry even now, that I made things harder for him by arriving: that he’d reached the point of being ready to die but was ashamed to perform such a private or disappointing act in front of one of his sons.
p. 43 In the last few decades, many judges and scholars have chosen to speak of a “zone of privacy,” rather than a “sphere of liberty,” but this is a shift in emphasis, not in the substance: not the making of a new doctrine but the repackaging and remarketing of an old one.
p. 52 Walking up Third Avenue on a Saturday night, I feel bereft. All around me, attractive young people are hunched over their StarTacs and Nokias with preoccupied expressions, as if probing a sore tooth, or adjusting a hearing aid, or squeezing a pulled muscle; personal technology has begun to look like a personal handicap. All I really want from a sidewalk is that people see me and let themselves be seen, but even this modest ideal is thwarted by cell-phone users and their unwelcome privacy.
p. 65 Panic grows in the gap between the increasing length of the project and the shrinking time increments of cultural change: How to design a craft that can float on history for as long as it takes to build it? The novelist has more and more to say to readers who have less and less time to read: Where to find the energy to engage with a culture in crisis when the crisis consists in the impossibility of engaging with the culture?
p. 66 The essence of fiction is solitary work: the work of writing, the work of reading. I’m able to know Sophie Bentwood intimately, and to refer to her as casually as I would to a good friend, because I poured my own feeling of fear and estrangement into the construction of her. If I know her only through the video of Desperate Characters, (Shirly MacLaine made the movie in 1971, as a vehicle for herself), Sophie would remain an Other, divided from me by the screen on which I viewed her, by the surficiality of film, and by MacLaine’s star presence. At most, I might feel I knew MacLaine a little better.
p. 71 In publishing circles, confessions of doubt are widely referred to as “whining” – the idea being that cultural complaint is pathetic, and self-serving in writers who don’t sell, ungracious in writers who do. For people as protective of their privacy and as fiercely competitive as writers are, mute suffering would seem to be the safest course. However sick with foreboding you feel inside, it’s best to radiate confidence and to hope that it’s infectious.
p. 77 Reading does resemble more nerdy pursuits in that it’s a habit that both feeds on a sense of isolation and aggravates it. Simply being a “social isolate” as a child does not, however, doom you to bad breath and poor party skills as an adult. In fact, it can make you hypersocial. It’s just that at some point you’ll begin to feel a gnawing, almost remorseful need to be alone and do some reading – to reconnect to that community.
p. 82 Again and again, readers told Heath the same thing: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive – my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity. ‘Substance’ is more than ‘this weight book.’ Redaing that book gives me substance.” This substance, Heath adds, is most often transmitted verbally, and is felt to have permanence. “Which is why,” she said, “computers won’t do it for readers.”
p. 85 Anthony Lane, in a pair of recent essays in The New Yorker, has demonstrated that while most of the novels on the contemporary best-seller list are vapid, predictable, and badly written, the best-sellers of fifty years ago were also vapid, predictable, and badly written. Lane’s essays usefully destroy the notion of a golden pre-television age when the American masses had their noses stuck in literary masterworks; he makes it clear that this country’s popular tastes have become no worse in a half a century.
p. 107 His shirt darkens with sweat as we walk through the long morning shadows, through the vacancy of a residential neighborhood emptied by the morning rush hour. Children who stay home sick and writers who stay home working know this emptiness. It brings a sense of estrangement from the world, and for me that sense has always been sharpened and confirmed by the sound of a mailman’s footsteps approaching and receding. To be a mailman is to inhabit this emptiness for hours, to disturb five hundred abandoned lawns, one after another.
p. 160 There’s no simple, universal reason why people smoke, but there’s one thing I’m sure of: they don’t do it because they’re slaves to nicotine. My best guess about my own attraction to the habit is that I belong to a class of people whose lives are insufficiently structured. The mentally ill and the indigent are also members of this class. We embrace a toxin as deadly as nicotine, suspended in an aerosol of hydrocarbons and nitrosamines, because we have not yet found pleasures or routines that can replace the comforting, structure-bringing rhythm of need and gratification that the cigarette habit offers. One word for the structuring might be “self-medication”; another might be “coping.”
p. 165 I understand my life in the context of Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson, not David Letterman or Jerry Seinfeld. But the life I understand by way of books feels increasingly lonely. It has little to do with the mediascape that constitutes so many other people’s present. For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing, here in the anxious mid-nineties, the final tipping of a balance. For critics inclined to alarmism, the shift from a culture based on the printed word to a culture based on virtual images – a shift that began with television and is now being completed with computers – feels apocalyptic.
p. 166 Sanders’s generalizations about “young people today” apply only to the segment of the population (admittedly a large one) that lacks the money or the leisure to inoculate its children against the worst ravages of electronic media.
p. 167 If a market exists, someone will inevitably exploit it, and so it’s pointless to ask “Do we need this?” or “How might it harm us?”
p. 171 “By contrast,” he says, “the written word sparks images and evokes metaphors that get much of their meaning from the reader’s imagination and experiences. When you read a novel, much of the color, sound, and motion come from you.”
p. 172 Compared with the state of a person watching a movie or clicking through hypertext, he says, absorption in a novel is closer to a state of meditation, and he is at his best when tracing the subtleties of this state. Here is his description of his initial engagement with a novel: “I feel a tug. The chain has settled over the sprockets; there is the feel of meshing, then the forward glide.”
p. 173 Instead of a soul, membership in a crowd. Instead of wisdom, data.
p. 178 But the first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone.
p. 204 Obsolescence is the leading product of our national infatuation with technology, and I now believe that obsolescence is not a darkness but a beauty: not perdition but salvation. The more headlong the progress of technological development, the greater the volume of obsolete detritus. And the detritus isn’t simply material. It’s angry religion, resurgent countercultural ideologies, the newly unemployed, the eternally unemployable. These are the fiction writer’s guarantee that he or she will never be alone. Obsolescence is our legacy.
p. 231 Lowering one’s eyes is a sign of deference – I learned this very early on. But it’s also, of course, a way of not seeing.
p. 249 There’s something medieval Christian about The Recognitions. The novel is like a huge landscape painting of modern New York, peopled with hundreds of doomed but energetic little figures…
p. 258 Fiction is the most fundamental human art. Fiction is storytelling, and our reality arguably consists of the stories we tell about ourselves.
p. 294 As I sat watching football and listened to the barren wind, I believed that the reason I couldn’t stand to look at my old house was that I was done with it: that I didn’t want to feel the inevitable nothing when I went inside it, I didn’t want to have to blame an innocent house for still existing after its meaning had been emptied out.
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