I previously mentioned in passing of acquiring Sven Birkets's collection of essays on reading, "The Gutenberg Elegies". Over the past few nights, I have read quite a few of them, and I have felt that the high praise this book was greeted with when it came out in 1994-1995 is very well deserved. While I am yet to synthesize all the multiple strands of thought that Mr. Birkets laid out in this book, I thought I should make note of the some of the predictions he had made ten years ago in one of the final essays titled "The Death of Literature" that I thought were shockingly prescient.

After surveying the scene of reading and writing, in academia and in the larger populace, and finding it approaching an Eliot-ish wasteland, Mr. Birkets writes:

"We are, I believe, in typical American fashion, approaching another crisis. A crisis of meaning....slowly, steadily, we may see the pressure build, and with in the awareness in individuals of a vacany at the subjective core, a gnawing sense of need....and when the crisis does come, no chip or screen will have a solution for it. It will flash forth as an insistent need, a soul craving, and nothing binary will suffice.

I predict three possible outcomes, or collective reactions to this crisis. One, a return to religion - to churches, temples, ashrams - to all the places that have traditionally served as repositories of the sacred. Whatever else they may be, our religions are grand stories that make a place for us. Two, I would expect to see a rush to therapy, the resort of choice for those who are experiencing a sense of emergency in secular terms. People will pay and pay to counter the distracted drift of the perpetual present with some explanatory narrative that has a purchase on time, on history. The fragmented self will be brought to trained professionals for reconstitution.

And three, I see the possibility of a genuine resurgence of the arts, of literature in particular. This may be wishful thinking - our electronic age may leave us unfit for the rigors of stationary words on a page - but grant me the wish. For literature remains unexcelled means of interior exploration and connection-making. The whole art - fiction, poetry, and drama - is fundamentally pledged to coherence, not just in terms of contents, but in forms as well. The structures of language represent a doorway back into duration..."

From an overview of the general scene, I think it is fair to conclude that it is the first two outcomes - a turn to messanic religiosity, and a dependance of mood altering drugs and therapy - that have come to pass with the exception of a few cavemen and luddites holding out in their booklined fastnesses.Still, still I have hope for reading and its resurgence, if for no other reason, it keeps things from falling apart while holding the somewhat cracked center of my life intact.