A Commonplace Book

The frantic concern for recency illustrates, despite protestations to the contrary, the computer-aided triumph of the "empty-receptacle" view of the mind. Date-able knowledge is at the same time data-ble knowledge -- something we collect and store in our heads, like bits of information in a database.

The truth of the matter is that the mind contains nothing of enduring value. Its assets -- and the very substance of its achievements -- reside in its own, rigorously disciplined, revelatory shape, its flexibility, its strengthened vividness, its powers of attention and concentration, its self-awareness, its capacity for reverence and devotion.

...[T]he corporation is a mechanism operating with a life of its own, delivering its freight of good or ill independently of the inner qualities, the choices -- the ideals -- of its larger human constituency. And the decisive fact is this: such automatic side effects, whatever their nature can only be destructive in the long run, since they testify to an abdication of consciousness.

The dissonance occurs only when one tries to imagine these same adventurers standing in a library, surrounded in three dimensions by records of human achievement far surpassing what is now Net-accessible. Would there, in these surroundings, be the same, breathless investigation of every room and shelf, the same shouts of glee at finding this collection of art prints or that provocative series of essays or these journalistic reports on current events?