“it is Birkerts’s thinking that is the highlight throughout; his musing aloud on a deep-seated fear “[t]hat we have a different, much diminished sense of human presence now … that something deep in the human ecology has been disturbed””
“his sharp-eyed analysis of the shape of that disturbance and the ways in which its effects are seen throughout society — We feel it as anxiety, as self-detachment, as a sense of incompleteness, a private distress to which we respond, if we do at all, by turning to therapy, to prescriptions, to meditation and endorphin-releasing exertions.”
“One potential cause for all this, he argues, is the manner in which we have replaced what he terms “duration time” — periods of contemplation and reverie — with a “now” time filled with constant electronic distraction. This loss of something he views as essential to our individual being, combined with a general reduced human presence in our lives and our increased reliance on faceless networks, will lead, he fears, to a “drift toward electronic merging, social hiving — with all the systemic leveling of idiosyncrasy that implies.””
“this dystopia hasn’t been brutally enforced by some tyrannical government entity. Just the opposite — it’s one that we seemingly can’t sign up for fast enough (even Birkerts admits to using email and going online, though at the time of the writing he had so far continued to resist the siren call of the cell phone).”
“Rilke’s watchword, the driving concept of the elegies, is transformation. He sees our tenancy on earth as fragile; he registers an anxiety which … is uncannily like the anxiety many of us live with every day. But where the impulse of our age is clearly toward instrumental mastery, toward what is, in effect, the invention of a parallel realm in which we all collaborate and, perhaps, move toward some kind of social merging, he offers up the difficult other course. Instead of turning from the demands imposed on individual being — which is to say, at root, solitary being — he urges fronting that world, taking it in, suffering it, and in the process, though with no guarantee of success, transforming it … [He] asks that we take the world in, swallow it in our living, and then labor to spin it into the stuff of a higher awareness.”
“Imagination is a formative inward power, independent and generative. Information, by contrast, and by original definition, imparts inner form from the outside … Imagination creates shape; information imposes shape. The former is the energy of the self, the latter the energy of the world … Great art, ambitious, realized art, not only lifts us to its level, but also gives us energy in the form of attention; it offers an inward integrity to help counter the dissipating force of signals, endless distractions of data. It arms us, if only for a time, against the depletion that threatens on every front. But more than a refuge or a sanctuary, it is also an inoculation; it is a preemptive engagement undertaken on behalf of the individual and it keeps the ideal of individuation, so threatened, still viable.”
“Birkerts shows us that that finding things to pay attention to requires not a trip to MoMA but “an action of the spirit.””
“Each point, I think, is a center around which a world can be drawn. It’s all about attention. Attention. On the street, in the spot where the pavement dips, a puddle filled with sky: Gray, blue, perfect. How have I been sitting here all this time, looking this way and that, and not seen that glowing patch of changing light? No end to looking, I think …”