Thought of the Day

Readers, a Category 1 maelstrom of literary doom and gloom has snuck up on me this week. Normally I can keep myself on an even keel about the prognosticators offering a dire view of our future, but currently I feel as if I have morphed into a Grinch with an academic heart two sizes too small.

Why?

Exhibit A: At the mall over the weekend I overheard a girl comment to her friends that she gets confused between The Grapes of Wrath and Fruit of the Loom underwear brand. Her friend commented the underwear was probably better than the book. And waaay hotter. The first girl agreed.

If my soul hadn't already sunk through my shoes, then this did it in.

Exhibit B: I read this article today. That's right, not only can the largest corporate bookstore in America not maintain a strong presence in a literary city in NYC, but the charm of the used bookstore is rapidly losing its appeal.

What happened to heady intellectualism? A culture of consciousness? Simply put: where my nerds at?

I wonder sometimes if I am pining for a lost art, a passion that is only shared by those who are just as obsolete or old-fashioned as my friends and I have apparently become. Is this the case? Our blog's motto, while conceived in some flippancy, also seems a little more accurate tonight -- "being literate in an increasingly illiterate world".

Now, lest you think I spend my time sitting alone in a dark room and silently writhing my hands in distress, I am cheered by the recognition that my fellow bibliophiles will not go gently into that good night as they have fought before for a rebirth of reading. A new twist on an old tale, if you will.

I also just stumbled upon this quote from Emerson to a friend about the power of reading which has helped:

"It happens to us once or twice in a lifetime to be drunk with some book which probably has some extraordinary relative power to intoxicate us and none other; and having exhausted that cup of enchantment we go groping in libraries all our years afterwards in the hope of being in Paradise again."

Perhaps Paradise is slowly becoming a little less crowded, but that doesn't make it any less precious... Does it?