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.
It can be scary to find out you've been wrong about something but we can't be afraid to change our minds, to accept that things are different, that they'll never be the same, for better or for worse. We have to be willing to give up what we used to believe. The more we're willing to accept what is and not what we thought, we'll find ourselves exactly where we belong.
You can't change the world; you can't fix the whole environment. But you can recycle. You can turn the water off when you're brushing your teeth. You can do small things.
I think my favourite thing about doing conventions is the parents taking their kids to see their favourite drag idols, because open-minded, progressive parents are making such a change in the world right now. The more open-minded these kids are being raised, the more hope I have for the future.
It is time for me to chuck in the sponge. To retire from films and stage. The heart for it has gone out of me: it won't come back.
The first snow always startles. It covers the tricycle in the driveway, turning its frame into an abstact sculpture that says: See how quickly yesterday turns into today.
So easy to fall into a rut, isn't it? Why should ruts be so comfortable and so unpopular?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.