An ancient antidote to anxiety
THIS digital age, I contend, is like any other, despite the protests of the curmudgeon set, who feel we’ll all soon be pixellated into dust by ones and zeroes. If you’re a reader, rejoice, for you will flourish — as you’ve done in every age since the invention of writing — because of your ability to overcome, merely by practising your hobby, eternal problems dressed up as modern ills. Here are a few current catchphrases that won’t catch you:
Range Anxiety, or, the worry that your battery-powered device — be it your smartphone or your Prius — will drain too quickly and leave you stranded. Books, on the other hand, don’t wind down when you use them — they actually wind up — and with 800-page tomes like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Elizabeth Catton’s The Luminaries lying around, you’ll never fear for running out of read.
Carbon Footprint, or, the destruction you wreak by performing activities — such as using your smartphone or driving your Prius — that induce Range Anxiety. As a reader, however, sunk deep into your couch chuckling along with David Sedaris’s Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, your contribution to our merry trip to hell in an air-conditioned handbasket is very slight indeed. Don’t stir.
Geobragging, or, the art of garnering attention by drawing a picture of your everexpanding Carbon Footprint using items that cause Range Anxiety as your artistic instruments — such as driving your Prius to the beach and informing all and sundry of your location with a status update and a snap from your smartphone. “At Llandudno!” you geobrag. Meanwhile, we, the readers, are in far more interesting places, like the astonishing world conjured up by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst in s., which comes packaged complete with a Dewey Decimal number on its spine and a story told, literally, in its own marginalia. A chronicle of places morosely ungeobragged, smartphones
dejectedly unactivated
ADD, or the new solipsism, a condition marked by Geobragging on one’s smartphone about the Carbon Footprint of one’s Prius while driving to the therapist to talk about one’s nagging Range Anxiety. It afflicts practically everyone except readers nowadays, and the time will come when we will need to rise up against the Inattentive and hack them to bits, like in zombie movies. Meantime, do what the rest of us are doing: tune in and drop out of the digital chatter by turning on to Dust — successor to Wool — by Hugh Howey.
Bucket List, or, the pyrite ingot atop the pyramid of fool’s-gold tales we tell ourselves that must, at last, collapse under its own weight. Possession of a Bucket List — such an inelegant term — is an act of self-parody that is the ultimate symptom of ADD: a chronicle of Priuses wistfully undriven, places morosely ungeobragged, smartphones dejectedly unactivated, Carbon Footprints dolefully unstamped and Range Anxieties whimperingly untested. Fortunately, we who read are inoculated against such nonsense: we’ve been ignoring “Bucket Lists” of books — all of which contain James Joyce’s
Finnegan’s Wake, and no, you’ll never get past the first page — since the days of Gutenberg’s press. We readers can resist the list. This reader, in particular, is going to shrug off the pressures of having never cracked open Thucydides and settle into Justin Cartwright’s new novel, Lion Heart, tonight.
Link love: Book Shelfie
Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year is selfie, a photograph one has taken of oneself, typically with a smartphone for uploading to social media. Our favourite variation? The bookshelfie — a selfie taken in front of your books. See Tumblr: