Читать книгу Neomedievalism. Reflections on the Post-Enlightenment Era онлайн

19 страница из 45

To date, the float level of op-eds walks the 800-word limit, and dis-counting.

Now, except for the brochures and pamphlets that fill our mailboxes every day and bestsellers sold by the kilogram, this dramatic, unlimited reduction of texts in the current media is not due to a space issue, as in the times since the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, for convent scribes, incunabula, heretics’ hermeneutics, the French encyclopédistes, and all paper periodicals from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. It is due to the new reader.

I do not intend to propose Being and Nothingness by Sartre as a reading model, but I do recommend it at least as an intellectual exercise. The problem is that every day we have more writing to pay attention to. Almost all are distractions; nearly all are failed stimuli. We do not have more options than before; that is patently false. We just have more distractions and, consequently, more need to interrupt everything right after we start it.

But the day of every man and woman still has twenty-four hours. The same twenty-four hours a reader of Flaubert and Dostoyevsky, Kafka and Ernesto Sabato had. Therefore, we have the same time to deal with more things and get to the bottom of them.