Decades ago, Hannah Arendt wrote of a “common world” that could only exist if “differences of position and the resulting variety of perspectives notwithstanding, everybody is always concerned with the same object.” Now the common world has exploded.
Wright has figured out how to build small, affordable homes he could be proud of. He calls them Usonian, because they capture the democratic spirit of the United States. They are simple—no paint, stucco, or wallpaper; no basement, attic, or garage.
The word “abstract” means to remove something; to condense; to lack a concrete, physical existence. Abstraction is supremely useful—but it should not wind up more highly valued than the world from which it abstracts.
I never thought much about the pragmatic value of the humanities either, to be honest. I just knew it was my world. When, with alacrity, I dropped out of a business certificate and picked up a philosophy major, it felt like a guilty hobby. An indulgence.
I was missing Walter Mosley, and I saw that “The Last Days” is now streaming—with Samuel L. Jackson, no less, as that ninety-one-year-old. No way was I going to disrespect Mosley, a consummate writer, by streaming before reading. I opened the book.
Maybe this is better. The human element is being removed. We no longer need a partner or best friend to say, “You look stressed, why not take a break?” Exes have less room to demonize one another, because their communications have been muted and massaged. Nobody can accuse the AI of being on the other person’s side, which has got to be the worst part of doing couples counseling. But I sense a flattening, as we lose some of the messiest, most instructive interactions and automate wisdom, negotiation, health, self-expression.
“The prospect of passing a night in the back woods of Indiana was by no means agreeable, but I screwed my courage to the proper pitch, and set forth determined to see with my own eyes, and hear with my own ears, what a camp-meeting really was.”
After putting the IBWA and the Hobo College system in place, James Eads How started a monthly magazine, the “Hobo News,” printed in St. Louis and later in Cincinnati. A forerunner of the now familiar street papers, it was bankrolled by his inheritance but written “by the hoboes, for the hoboes, of the hoboes.”
Watching “Turn Every Page,” you realize that Gottlieb managed to be editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf, and The New Yorker without screens. Caro managed to write “The Power Broker” and four volumes of a brilliant and definitive biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson without screens, and he is working on the fifth without a screen.
Halfway through this book, I find out that last summer, our own university library acquired the third print edition of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. There it waits, just through the glass doors I enter weekly.