How We Read Now

If Herodotus can ask 2,400 years ago for immortality while striving to prevent his subject from being “forgotten in time”, then perhaps it is not too presumptuous for me, more than two millennium later, to ask you to read for five minutes. Of course Herodotus wrote with an eternal, almost sculpted, quality, his words on the Greco-Persian Wars translated and studied and assigned in countless classrooms over the centuries, his words carved into stone for what is certainly an unreasonable amount of time. I don’t quite expect a similar result, as the writing in our century, it seems, comes in sentences that are a tad more malleable, with the age of permanence pretty much at its end. So you won’t stumble upon Herodotus today. You won’t discover any ageless, fixed sentences. You won’t even uncover any unexpected books. To stroll through the modern library in your pocket is to watch the once static and eternal books around you contort and transform before your very eyes—with every page now liquidlike, shifty, calling out, adapting in realtime to your interests.

 
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Πηγή: charlesschifano.substack.com