I can't predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive - no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer's life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the loss of traditional reading habits and the physical archives of a writer's work due to digitalization.
Paul Theroux expresses concern over the transformation of reading habits in the digital age, lamenting the decline of physical manuscripts and personal writings that were once cherished. He emphasizes that the shift from tangible forms of literature to digital formats represents not just a change in medium, but a profound loss of the emotional and historical context encapsulated in physical archives, which hold the essence of a writer's life and creativity.
In practice
During a discussion about the impact of technology on literature, this quote can illustrate the emotional loss of physical books.
Notice how many of the Olympic athletes effusively thanked their mothers for their success? βShe drove me to my practice at four in the morning,β etc. Writing is not figure skating or skiing. Your mother will not make you a writer. My advice to any young person who wants to write is: leave home.
I'm not pessimistic about Africa. The cities just seem big and hopeless. But there's still a great green heart where there's possibility. There's hope in the wilderness.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown.
You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back.
If citizens do not believe they can change their leaders through the ballot box, they will find other ways, even at the risk of destabilizing their countries.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.
It's really weird how your life changes. Tonight I'm drinking water. Four years ago? Opium. Night and day, you know?
It becomes more necessary to see the truth as it is if you realize that the only vehicle for change are these people who have lost their personality.
Denying women the right to drive has imposed huge costs on Saudi citizens.
I am willing to release old negative beliefs. They are only thoughts that stand in my way. My new thoughts are positive and fulfilling.
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