May262009
"Tell a writer you write and depression sets in; tell a writer you read and gratitude blossoms. Especially now, in the Blog Age, when it seems that more people want to write than to read (not realizing that you need to read in order to write anything that is worth reading, or hasn’t already been written). But this is the inevitable result when a culture prizes self-expression over learning. It is the written equivalent of a room in which everyone is talking and nobody is listening, particularly to the dead. Literature, like French, has ceased to be the lingua franca for the so-called educated crowd."
— Thomas Swick in an essay titled “Have Book, Will Travel”
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