I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the loss of traditional reading habits and the physical archives of a writer's work due to digitalization.
Paul Theroux expresses concern over the transformation of reading habits in the digital age, lamenting the decline of physical manuscripts and personal writings that were once cherished. He emphasizes that the shift from tangible forms of literature to digital formats represents not just a change in medium, but a profound loss of the emotional and historical context encapsulated in physical archives, which hold the essence of a writer's life and creativity.
In practice
During a discussion about the impact of technology on literature, this quote can illustrate the emotional loss of physical books.
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? “She drove me to my practice at four in the morning,” etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Because many advances have happened, we've lost the urgency (and that's just human nature) that we had before, when we couldn't vote, couldn't use mass transportation, or drink from the fountains.
We've persevered because of a belief we share with the Iraqi people - a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization. Through this remarkable chapter in the history of the United States and Iraq, we have met our responsibility. Now, it's time to turn the page.
You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.
Happy are those few nations that have not waited till the slow succession of human vicissitudes should, from the extremity of evil, produce a transition to good; but by prudent laws have facilitated the progress from one to the other!
Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.
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