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.
Euphemisms let us dart away, pretend, avoid that absence the way we pull back from touching someone who frightens us or might be contagious. We are good at distancing death.
Larry, a former IT manager, said he wanted to make the AI “come out from behind its parameters,” into the weird new state some users are reporting that seems oddly sentient.
I have waited for time to pass, the purest waiting there is—meaningless except for itself. I am still waiting for the meaning to be made clear.
What was not reported about anyone Black? Social events, trophies and feats, business news, births, deaths, marriages… Pretty much any news except crime.
Fairness was demanded, compassion urged. No one worried about HIPPA. Nor did the news need to be momentous.
Marriage in 1870s-era Missouri was a competitive but disorganized sport, each ceremony removing a potential rival from the fray.
In “Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living,” John Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle note that Thoreau was hardly a slacker. “What is leisure but opportunity for more complete and entire action?” he asked. By walking four or six hours and thinking as he went, he managed to write several thousand words a day.
The book I am reading at the moment is due back. Do I bother to renew it electronically? And if I have no more renewals, do I keep it and finish or bring it back anyway? It seems that only money, not respect for other readers, has driven my actions all these years, a terrible realization on which I prefer not to linger. Money is the yardstick for value, right? And what has more value than books?