(This is a chapter that comes late in a longer, as yet unpublished, work.)
When I was a child I would sometimes stand in front of bookshelves, any of several sets of bookshelves in our house but most often the one with the novels in it, wondering if there was anything there I might want to read. Ann, in librarian mode, would come along and annoy me, interrupting my fruitless contemplation by pulling down this book and that as possibilities. It was a good service she did, though like any such it was hit and miss: I took to EM Forster, not Thomas Wolfe. Forster left us with the motto only connect, and in Howards End lets his heroine give voice to a London problem, that connections are too easy, making people careless of them, the ease of connections thus having the potential to leave one without good ones when you needed them; as opposed, one supposes, to smaller and less cosmopolitan places, where connections with others are in more limited supply but less easily lost. Not having read more than a few pages into Look Homeward, Angel, I have no firsthand knowledge of what Wolfe said there that led to him calling his next book You Can’t Go Home Again, but I gather from what I’ve read about those books that in the first he had offended too many people he had known in the little city of Asheville, North Carolina, and so couldn’t go back. Both Forster and Wolfe are telling us stories about human connection, and the difficulty maintaining it, a common theme for novelists, and in keeping with Patrick White’s bemoaning his misplacement of that raftful of memorable souls.
All three of those gentlemen did, despite their anxiety about connection, connect to others, many thousands of others, in their chosen medium of writing some very personal fiction. I am concerned though less with the connection they made with their readers, and more with that amongst the readers. An author’s connection with a reader is terrifically asymmetric, the reader knowing a lot about the author, how they think and what is important to them, while the author probably knows nothing at all about most readers.
When I first started teaching I felt a version of this asymmetry with pain, at the end of a class, even – or especially - what had seemed a most successful and satisfactory class, as I went home lonely: I had delivered, but no connection had come back in my direction. When I have studied under a good teacher, on the other hand, I have felt connection with my fellow students, because we now had a shared experience, a shared pool of new knowledge, a common set of keys to understanding the world, and both a shared appreciation and a shared critique of the teacher. Taken to perverse but all too common extremes, we see here one root of cults – the community of some guru’s acolytes - and also too often the abuse of those acolytes by the teacher seeking inappropriate personal connections with the students, which if we are inclined to sympathy we might view as an effort to remedy the asymmetry of the connection.
The connections between readers are looser than among students who have sat in the same classroom, but connections there are. My father told me that when reading Veblen he could hear the cadences, the attitude, the style of argument he knew from Minneota Icelanders, and I expect that Holm’s Minneota milkman - who carved Veblen’s image in a tree trunk, and who might even have been someone my father knew, back home - I expect that he heard much the same thing as he read. In this way all those who have listened to Icelandic-American cadences, and all who have heard them in their own heads while reading The Theory of the Leisure Class, enjoy a layer of common code which can lead to a shared understanding of things; and so on, through all of literature and all cadences.
Ann came from a tradition in the humanities which saw reading good writing as a way to develop an understanding of others, indeed to become a better person. Sometimes it seemed she did not believe there was any better activity in life than reading fiction and poetry: telling her of the courses I was taking at Berkeley – in that particular term, it was mostly economics – she sighed, almost cried, but nothing for your soul? Sarah, early teens, telling her she might want to be a doctor, got, well, if you call that an education, so Sarah went and found other kinds of education. George was not so narrow in his approval of subject matter, appreciating all kinds of expertise, but when I mentioned, one day at the cabin, edging into a conversation between him and his old student Bill, by then a professor of mathematics, with whom he could talk endlessly about science and history, politics and myth - when I mentioned that I wanted to become a lawyer, they laughed that at least I would have money to compensate for such a boring life. I don’t know what sort of career advice, perhaps it would be better to call it career dissuasion, Jenny and Matthew may have received. We all knew that what fell within the scope of Ann’s esteem was, though in a narrower range of disciplines than George’s, at least accorded the approval of both.
It should perhaps then not be surprising that as I write I keep referring to what I read: some of it, things I read long ago, more of it what I happen to read while I write, and in particular what I have read because my writing has provoked me to find something out, to fill in the picture, by reading. As you read this I hope that you enjoy its veering back and forth between stories of my life and things that I have read, that it is not too much a break in cadence, or too egregious a pattern of digression from whatever it is here that interests you; my excuse for indulging myself in this way is that both the stories and the reading are my life, nodes in my web of connections which I hope somehow also connect with your own.
It is therefore disconcerting to me, having written this far – and perhaps also to you who have, thank you, read this far – to come to the realization that we are living through the obsolescence of both reading and writing. I read, in a long post by a philosophy professor who blogs pseudonymously as Hilarius Bookbinder, that Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke. By “functionally illiterate” I mean “unable to read and comprehend adult novels by people like Barbara Kingsolver, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.” I picked those three authors because they are all recent Pulitzer Prize winners, an objective standard of “serious adult novel.” Furthermore, I’ve read them all and can testify that they are brilliant, captivating writers; we’re not talking about Finnegans Wake here. But at the same time they aren’t YA, romantasy, or Harry Potter either.
College students, studying philosophy, unable to … comprehend books which critics a generation or two ago would snobbishly have dismissed as merely middlebrow. Professor Bookbinder teaches a course on existentialism, meant for advanced students, and now operates on the assumption that none of them read any of the required texts: they come to class without books, they can get AI summaries. I dip back into Middlemarch: the narrative is complex, none of the characters has a correct understanding of their own motivations or those of others, we are asked to have sympathy for people who are doing thoughtless or even cruel things, the sentences are long and complicated and often cannot be understood without close attention – I can imagine many obstacles.
I ask Leonardo about this, he’s a teenager, he should know: is it because modern media has shrunk our attention spans? Because we expect moral certainty, heroes and villains? Nobody has free time, he tells me, because as soon as they don’t have anything else they need to do, they look at their phone. I have him saying they, but he may have said you, to include himself – he’s on the cusp, here, he reads a lot, and writes, but the phone is a temptation. Even those of us who grew into middle age without it feel that temptation, I know, but when I succumb at least I know what I’m missing; imagine if you’d never learned the joy of unpicking complex texts, and had few contemporaries to share the experience with even if you did. It seems that the ability to decode complex texts is being lost to most among a generation of humans.
Is this a tragedy? Does reading do us any good, anyway? In Second Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich shows us people who lived through the fall of Soviet communism. Her text is all other people talking, people she interviewed. A man tells how he and his wife, having graduated from one of the best universities in Russia, took menial jobs – he, stoking a furnace, she, a janitor – because in the Soviet system the difference in pay between these and jobs with responsibility was not great, and in these menial jobs they had much free time, in which they read. We read, we went through tons of books. We talked, we thought we were coming up with new ideas. … In the end, everything we thought we knew was nothing but figments of our imagination. … The Russia of our books and kitchens [where the talking happened] never existed. It was all in our heads. With Perestroika, everything came crashing down. … Who cares if you’ve read Hegel? “Humanities” started sounding like a disease. That was St Petersburg; we can hope that the milkman found reading existentialists in Minneota more useful, but as you know I have no confidence in that.
Perhaps, then, reading was already obsolete at the time the Berlin Wall fell, and we’re only catching on to that fact now that the obsolescence of writing has made the obsolescence of reading obvious. The obsolescence of writing was decreed by the Silicon Valley in the form of generative AI. AI digests a lot of old texts and then, from a few words you use to prompt it, will use those old texts to produce a new one, proving that there is no new writing under the sun; it would not be a great leap of logic, I think, to infer from this that there is also nothing worth reading. Writing now is an artistic survival of an obsolete craft, like calligraphy, or the making of samurai swords, and the only readers will soon be connoisseurs who would like to believe, and would like you to believe, that they know the fine points and appreciate actual human writing for being genuine, better in some subtle way from the AI version. The self-estimation of such connoisseur-readers may be entirely correct, yet irrelevant, their skills obsolete; obsolete not – contra Alexievich’s informant – because the insights they gain from reading are incorrect, but because the web of fellow readers with whom these insights may be shared, compared and disputed, has become too thin to be of any consequence.
I am not being entirely flippant. You, reader, as one of the cognoscenti, likely already know of the idea that AI could be a leap, a step change, in our storage, retrieval, processing and communication of knowledge: a change on a par with the invention of writing itself. And that as such, it is likely not only enhancing what we can do with knowledge, but also in other ways degrading what we can do with it. Writing let us use our brains differently from what we did when we were illiterate: with writing we did not need to remember as much, yet had access to much more information, and could communicate across time and space. Not needing to remember as much, none of us developed certain mental capacities – probably nobody alive today could do the sort of performances Homer and the numerous other bards among his contemporaries did, and which illiterate storytellers in some corners of the world continued to do into the 20th century.
I like to think that, if offered the trade, I would accept literacy at the expense of the possibility of developing a mega-memory: a move in the reverse direction – away from literacy, towards memory – would feel to me like the world closing in, I would be losing my ability to learn about so many people and places and ideas and things, past and present; stepping back from writing would, to this literate human, be as if an illiterate but articulate human became a dog, gaining contact with a new universe of knowledge through subtleties of smell, at the cost of language. But while I like to believe I would take that trade, really I have no way to put myself in the shoes of a person asked to give up the ability to recite any one out of some repertoire of epics to rapt audiences over a period of days; or, if not a bard but one of the bard’s contemporaries, perhaps to remember countless details about the flora, fauna, foods, poisons, all as they change through the seasons of the places the person lives, not just one place actually but of multiple places between which they migrate – to give all that up in exchange for being able to read novels and instruction manuals and to use the internet.
To speak of choice, then, is a game, since few have the opportunity to see the clouds from both sides. If you have not learned to love complex texts for their richness, if you have not learned to confront your own biases or logical errors or failures to make yourself clear while working your writing until it is tight, then you cannot know what you are missing when you avoid reading by asking AI for a summary, and avoid writing by asking AI for your text. Perhaps the only people who really understand this choice are those of us who did learn the skills of difficult reading and scrupulous writing, and have only after been exposed to the temptations of Instagram and AI, and so know what we are giving up when we succumb to our thirst for little dopamine hits, and so neglect our text. Within a few decades, people like us will be thin on the ground, and we will be remembered as we remember illiterate hunter-gatherers, remembered as a people with great powers of memory – not, we know, memory on the level of ancient bards, but we will look like that to the Instagrammers – whose knowledge is curiously limited to what we have been able personally to read in black and white.
I am old enough that I claim such curmudgeonly nostalgia as my privilege. Next time I hear somebody say OK, Boomer, my reply will be you don’t know shit, little Zoomer, and sadly for you age will not cure your ignorance, the best you can hope for is accumulation of Likes. When Marx wrote “accumulate, accumulate, that is Moses and all the prophets!”, he had the right word but no idea what debased meaning it would take. And since the Zoomer will have no clue as to what Marx did mean, no connection will have been made, and I be left trying in my head alternative formulations that might have done the job as I wander off in search of a nice park bench. Now, since you have already read this far, let me finish my story.