In his important new book, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America 1933-1973, Mark Greif, discussing writers like Ralph Ellison and Saul Bellow and related 1950s-era debates about what was expected, then, of fiction, points out that there was much talk at the time about the "death of the novel" as a major literary genre and cultural force. At the same time, though, and thanks to books like Invisible Man and The Adventures of Augie March, "esteem for the novel and the novelist, in the abstract, was at a peak," because the thoughtful American public looked to novels as the best possible venues for a revitalization of the very concept and concerns of the human person for a new era. Reading them, our moral captivation lasts.

~Randy Boyagoda

[Our] ease of access is in itself a blessing, but its misuse can make it a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more poetry & fiction, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possible respond to properly, and the consequence of such overindulgence is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces than yesterday's newspaper.

The first prerequisite for leading any satisfactory kind of personal life in a technological society is the ability to resist distraction. Human beings are not born with this ability but, from about the age of seven onwards, we are all capable of learning to direct our attention on this rather than that, down this path not down that. This concentration of attention is to the inner life what deliberate action is to the outer.

~ W.H. Auden, from his talk “Culture and Leisure”