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Sometimes the summer air feels like a book; sometimes reality feels literary. I’m thinking in particular of passages of Joyce’s Ulysses or Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Tolstoy’s evocations of peasant life or Thomas Hardy. All great writers are capable of the pastoral — but a kind of transcendental pastoralism that supersedes reality and becomes more real than real…. Whenever I see children playing games on their phone, on the subway, I can’t help but feel that they’re being deprived of this taste, this sense, of poetic super reality, that is consoling and vitalizing. Poor children who have no imagination and have been given opportunity to develop one: their summer evenings lack a layer. You can not substituted embodied, biological imagination with an external, digital imagination: it is not a one to one transfer, in the same way that Soylent doesn’t actually replace a meal, just the calories…. As I write this I notice that a man — rather corpulent, nerdy, and wonderfully indifferent to the slick, image conscious people around him — is reading a very-heavily dog-eared dual-translation of Dante, the same one that I have at home. I never expected to see someone reading Dante in the Italian. It’s a funny, and very Dante-esc collision of layers: medieval and modern.
