Quotes from David L. Ulin

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.

Reading (...) is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.

Reading, after all, is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more that for us to disengage.

For new media reactionaries...the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the Internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyper-linked, multi-networked world.

In the United States, however, we have lost the thread of logic in the stories that we tell.

Think about it: when we read, we soul travel, in the sense that we join, or enter, the consciousness of another human. We empathize—we have to—because our experience is enlarged.

Now, I take it for granted that the real relationship is not with the writer but with the writing, that it's on the page where we find the deepest sympathies

We live in an era when everyone wants to tell his or her story, but there is no real sense of what story means anymore.

Reading is, by its nature, a strategy for displacement, for pulling back from the circumstances of the present and immersing in the textures of a different life.

This is how we interact now, by mouthing off, steering every conversation back to our agendas, skimming the surface of each subject looking for an opportunity to spew.

No, we are in the midst of a broken story, and we have lost the ability to parse its lines.

Pierce is referring to the collapse of collective narrative, which is what we are experiencing as a culture: left and right relying on their own news sources, Raw Story and the Daily Caller, MSNBC and Fox News. Not only that, but even the factions are factionalized, and have been since at least the 1960s. Purity, the rabid fervor of the true believer (the same for all extremists, left and right), versus pragmatism, competence.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude," George Orwell argued in his essay "Why I Write,

Facebook, with its flow of useless particularity, makes it impossible to forget, thus impossible to remember.

replaced by a detail posted on a Web page, which may be more accurate but is probably less true. Gone is the friend you knew from home. Gone is the sled and the lake and the winter. Gone are the stories that existed in the gap between imagining and knowing and, with them, the distance that turned the particular into the universal and the mundane into the romantic.

If we frame every situation in terms of right and wrong, we never have to wrestle with complexity; if we define the world in narrow bands of black and white, we don't have to parse out endless shades of gray.

Reading is a form of self-identification that works, paradoxically, by encouraging us to identify with others, an abstract process that changes us in the most concrete of ways.