Subway Diary

The further we get away from the end of the 20th century, the easier it is to see the deluge of books about the ending of reading, canons, attention spans, values, and so on — by critics both magnificent and shallow — as part of a single, almost collective, reaction to a fundamental shift in the way human beings relate to their own creative production and potential. In the same way that Tolstoy saw Napoleon as the manifestation of a larger displacement of peoples from east to west, as the crest of a wave rather than as a Great Individual, we might see the last forty years of literary and cultural criticism as the visible vanguard of an invisible revolution. Simply put, roughly 100 years after the end of the Great War, the beginning of modernism, and the explosion of mass medias, cognition — and inner-structure of the human being — has been radically, and massively altered; the brain works, and is worked upon, differently, experiencing reality in a way that would be frighteningly alien to our great-grandparents. In exchange for more information — and the illusion of more control, predictability, quantifiability, and connection — we have sacrificed some ineffable element of our humanity. The body is paradoxically less corporeal now; the mind is less like a soul and more like a piece of software; all around us, the earth is less like Nature and more like an industrial park.