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The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

When people hear “social reading,” they think that it is proximate sociability on the device in real-time. But let’s not necessarily jam the social bit into the experience of reading. The explosion of conversation around those kinds of works is best done after the fact. The phrase “social reading” often causes people to misunderstand what it is.

it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting.

The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy‘s sacred work isn’t actually worth the time it takes to read it, but that process started long before the internet became mainstream.

we continued to  reassure one another that War and Peace or À La Recherche du Temps Perdu were Very Important in some vague way.  (This tension has produced an entire literature about the value of reading Proust that is now more widely read than Proust‘s actual oeuvre.)

because the return of reading has not brought about the return of the cultural icons we’d been emptily praising all these years, the enormity of the historical shift away from literary culture is now becoming clear.

William Sayoran once remarked, “Everybody has got to die … but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.” Luddism is a social version of that, where people are encouraged to believe that change is inevitable, except, perhaps, this time.

Luddism is bad for society because it misdirects people’s energy and wastes their time.

our older habits of consumption weren’t virtuous, they were just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access.

Communal experience is the human norm, but the solitary encounter with God is the egregious act that refreshes that norm.

Like other religious values, solitude was democratized by the Reformation and secularized by Romanticism.

The child who grew up between the world wars as part of an extended family within a tight-knit urban community became the grandparent of a kid who sat alone in front of a big television, in a big house, on a big lot. We were lost in space. Under those circumstances, the Internet arrived as an incalculable blessing

For Emerson, "the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society."

Modernism decoupled this dialectic. Its notion of solitude was harsher, more adversarial, more isolating. As a model of the self and its interactions, Hume's social sympathy gave way to Pater's thick wall of personality and Freud's narcissism — the sense that the soul, self-enclosed and inaccessible to others, can't choose but be alone. With exceptions, like Woolf, the modernists fought shy of friendship. Joyce and Proust disparaged it; D.H. Lawrence was wary of it; the modernist friendship pairs — Conrad and Ford, Eliot and Pound, Hemingway and Fitzgerald — were altogether cooler than their Romantic counterparts.

Protestant self-examination becomes Freudian analysis, and the culture hero, once a prophet of God and then a poet of Nature, is now a novelist of self — a Dostoyevsky, a Joyce, a Proust.

Romantic solitude existed in a dialectical relationship with sociability

My students told me they have little time for intimacy. And of course, they have no time at all for solitude. But at least friendship, if not intimacy, is still something they want.

In fact, their use of technology — or to be fair, our use of technology — seems to involve a constant effort to stave off the possibility of solitude, a continuous attempt, as we sit alone at our computers, to maintain the imaginative presence of others.

The more we keep aloneness at bay, the less are we able to deal with it and the more terrifying it gets.

the previous generation's experience of boredom

The two emotions, loneliness and boredom, are closely allied. They are also both characteristically modern. The Oxford English Dictionary's earliest citations of either word, at least in the contemporary sense, date from the 19th century.

Boredom is not a necessary consequence of having nothing to do, it is only the negative experience of that state. Television, by obviating the need to learn how to make use of one's lack of occupation, precludes one from ever discovering how to enjoy it. In fact, it renders that condition fearsome, its prospect intolerable. You are terrified of being bored — so you turn on the television.

consumer society wants to condition us to feel bored, since boredom creates a market for stimulation.

The alternative to boredom is what Whitman called idleness: a passive receptivity to the world.

Loneliness is not the absence of company, it is grief over that absence.

Internet is as powerful a machine for the production of loneliness as television is for the manufacture of boredom.

And losing solitude, what have they lost? First, the propensity for introspection, that examination of the self that the Puritans, and the Romantics, and the modernists (and Socrates, for that matter) placed at the center of spiritual life — of wisdom, of conduct. Thoreau called it fishing "in the Walden Pond of [our] own natures," "bait[ing our] hooks with darkness." Lost, too, is the related propensity for sustained reading.

Solitude, Emerson said, "is to genius the stern friend." "He who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions." One must protect oneself from the momentum of intellectual and moral consensus — especially, Emerson added, during youth.

The university was to be praised, Emerson believed, if only because it provided its charges with "a separate chamber and fire" — the physical space of solitude. Today, of course, universities do everything they can to keep their students from being alone, lest they perpetrate self-destructive acts, and also, perhaps, unfashionable thoughts.

The last thing to say about solitude is that it isn't very polite.

the ability to stand back and observe life dispassionately, is apt to make us a little unpleasant to our fellows