A Commonplace Book

Home | Authors | Titles | Words | Subjects | Random Quote | Advanced Search | About...


Search Help   |   Advanced Search

Imaginary Magnitude 8Lem 9

 

Are we not threatened with a flood of information? And is this not the monstrousness of it, that it crushes beauty by means of beauty, and annihilates truth by means of truth? For the sound of a million Shakespeares would produce the very same furious din and hubbub as the sound of a herd of prairie buffalo or sea billows. Such vastly multiplied content in collision brings no credit to thought, but rather its destruction. When faced with such a fate, is not Silence alone the redeeming Ark of the Covenant between the Creator and the Reader, since the Creator gains merit by refraining from spinning out just any old content, and the Reader gains it by praising such manifest self-denial?
-- Stanislaw Lem, Imaginary Magnitude (1981) p 3
permalink