Sven Birkerts. The Gutenberg Elegies.

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. That, God or no God, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it, a pattern that we could discern for ourselves if we could somehow lay the whole of our experience out like a map. And while it may be true that a reader cannot see the full map better than anyone else, he is more likely to live under the supposition that such an informing pattern does exist. He is, by inclination and formation, an explorer of causes and effects and connections through time. He does not live in the present as others do--not quite--because the present is known to be a moving point in the larger scheme he is attentive to (Sven Birkerts. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Boston and London: Faber and Faber, 1994, p. 85).

(Despite its lovely title, this book wrings its hands with disappointing predictability. I just thought that Flanagan's (see previous blog) and Birkerts' "readings" of narrative are so disconcertingly at odds, that I couldn't resist placing these two passages side by side. Is plot really as old-fashioned as the third-person masculine pronoun? Incidentally, if you want to read a readable, heartbreaking book on the fate of reading in an electronic age, check out Nicholson Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper.)