it can ruin you.
the kids at mefi were complaining about speedreading, the usual bric a brac skepticism against it...and one line cited from hobbes led me to dig out the la vopa essay (i think a subscription to project muse is required in order to read it) about herder, politics, print versus oral culture, and education's personal effect on one individual. returning to this was wonderful--i can never get enough of the pointed edges embedded in its lining.
What is striking about Herder's alienation from print, however, is that it conflated a reaction against outworn German habits of caste with a more modern disillusionment. In the "education" Herder wished he had received, books were a young man's tickets to the stimulations of social intercourse. Instead the silent privacy of reading left him with an oppressive sense of isolation. If he regretted the specifically German narrowness of his clerical initiation and his literary feuding, he also felt stunted by his solitary wanderings through the modern "groves" of print culture in the wider European world of the Enlightenment. (10)
Herder's phrase "the true commerce of hearts and minds" evoked the exchange of ideas in social interaction as well as the intellectual communion that print might effect. (11)
This was another sense in which he felt trapped in print; the move to Riga seemed to cut him off from what he called "literary intercourse ( Umgang )." Under these circumstances reading was not simply "dead"; it was also a "mute" activity, an act performed in silent isolation and limited to a "dead language of the eyes." (13)
It is a measure of his paralysis that, by the time he stopped writing his "Journal" (in Paris), his impulse to escape books had evolved into a determination to engage them with the "entire soul," so that reading itself would "become conversation, almost inspiration." (14)
What is striking about Herder's alienation from print, however, is that it conflated a reaction against outworn German habits of caste with a more modern disillusionment. In the "education" Herder wished he had received, books were a young man's tickets to the stimulations of social intercourse. Instead the silent privacy of reading left him with an oppressive sense of isolation. If he regretted the specifically German narrowness of his clerical initiation and his literary feuding, he also felt stunted by his solitary wanderings through the modern "groves" of print culture in the wider European world of the Enlightenment. (10)
Herder's phrase "the true commerce of hearts and minds" evoked the exchange of ideas in social interaction as well as the intellectual communion that print might effect. (11)
This was another sense in which he felt trapped in print; the move to Riga seemed to cut him off from what he called "literary intercourse ( Umgang )." Under these circumstances reading was not simply "dead"; it was also a "mute" activity, an act performed in silent isolation and limited to a "dead language of the eyes." (13)
It is a measure of his paralysis that, by the time he stopped writing his "Journal" (in Paris), his impulse to escape books had evolved into a determination to engage them with the "entire soul," so that reading itself would "become conversation, almost inspiration." (14)