We Neglect Recluses At Our Peril: Proust, Thoreau, and St Jerome in The Desert

We Neglect Recluses At Our Peril: Proust, Thoreau, and St Jerome in The Desert

In his prolonged solitude Marcel Proust created a new aesthetic out of tea biscuits, stewed chicken, twinges of jealousy, and found the most authentic thing about himself in that shadow world. Even in his tough Yankee pragmatism, Henry David Thoreau said “I have been thrilled to think that I owed a mental perception to the commonly gross sense of taste, that I have been inspired through the palate, that some berries which I had eaten on a hill-side had fed my genius.”

IQ & Mass Media

Google, rock videos, and the Web will no more make you stupid and shallow than propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap will make you smart and deep, argues Steven Pinker.

"New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points." More