Everyone is mourning the death of reading. Plato, Nietzsche and Ray Bradbury would have asked a different question: not how much we read, but what we keep.
Why we’re pointing you there
James Marriott’s new book, The New Dark Ages, warns that a post-literate future will look like the pre-literate past, and the review of it in The American Scholar reaches for the reading public’s favorite consolation: Bradbury’s book people on the railroad tracks. Intellicurean looks at that campfire again and notices what its admirers tend to forget. The men around it are book burners, who saved literature by learning it by heart. From there the essay follows the thread to Nietzsche’s contempt for an age of readers and the suspicion that it produced his Last Man, to a young Athenian with a speech hidden under his cloak, and to Plato’s rhapsode, the performer who held a crowd like a magnet and kept an eye on his fee. That is the figure a new voice made entirely of writing now stands to become.
What we liked most is that the essay fights fair. It gives the new voice its best case, a Socrates with time for everyone, before it answers, and it concedes the critic’s strongest point instead of scoring off him. It is also, plainly, a statement of what Intellicurean is for: essays made in conversation with a machine, checked against the page, and written to be carried away rather than scrolled past. How it ends, we’ll leave to the essay.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
