For every reader who dies today, a viewer is born, and we seem to be witnessing . . . the final tipping balance.
Interpretation
This quote signifies the transition from reading to viewing as dominant forms of media consumption.
Jonathan Franzen suggests that there is a significant shift happening in society, where traditional reading is declining as more people turn to visual media. This change marks a pivotal moment in how stories and information are consumed, indicating a potential cultural transformation and a reevaluation of the importance of reading in our lives.
In practice
In a speech about the future of literature, one could quote Franzen to discuss the rising influence of visual media.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
Whether it's racism, homophobia, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, religious intolerance or other bias - we demand to live in a country where we can be safe to be who we are, believe what we want and love whomever we want.
You have to make a conscious decision to change for your own well-being and that of your family and your country.
Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.
The amelioration of the world cannot be achieved by sacrifices in moments of crisis; it depends on the efforts made and constantly repeated during the humdrum, uninspiring periods, which separate one crisis from another, and of which normal lives mainly consist.
Women often find great roles in revolution, simply because the rules fall apart and everyone has agency, anyone can act.
My generation was the turning point. Women older than us didn't expect to have jobs or careers; those younger did. But we were where it was changing - which is interesting but uncomfortable.
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