Solitude

Scientists now agree with Jorge Luis Borges, who said, “Every time we remember something, after the first time, we’re not remembering the event, but the first memory of the event. Then the experience of the second memory and so on.” Through a brain process called reconsolidation, every retrieval of a given memory actually changes it. As one expert, Nelson Cowan, told me: “We edit the past in light of what we know now. But we remain utterly unaware that we’ve changed it.”

I believe I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity—to decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.

—Edith Wharton

pianist Glenn Gould, an eccentric genius who abruptly stopped giving concerts in 1964; he had retreated into the solitude of the studio and told an interviewer, “I’ve always had a sort of intuition that for every hour you spend with other human beings you need X number of hours alone. Now, what that X represents I don’t really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or seven and two-eighths, but it’s a substantial ratio.”

Real life feels more like a Tumblr feed than a novel.

Back in 1997, Sun Microsystems studied how people read and write online and found that it bore little resemblance to the quaint approach that’s historically thought of as “reading” and “writing.” Only 16 per cent of people read web pages the way they read books, for example. The majority “read” the page by scanning it, bouncing from corner to corner and picking out phrases and images in a hunter-gatherer fashion. Jakob Nielsen, the study’s author, described how people read online this way: “They don’t.”

More than half of e-book buyers read their purchases on smartphones, and the number who read books “primarily” on their phones rose from 9 per cent in 2012 to 14 per cent in 2015.

smartphones are in fact “antithetical to deep reading.”

as domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild ancestors, the brain of the “domesticated human” is significantly smaller than that of our pre-agriculture, pre-city selves

as media critic Evgeny Morozov has noted, as long as advertising remains the mainstay of Google’s profits, they’re not likely to care whether we discover things that cannot be monetized.

psychiatrist Anthony Storr found the same, saying that “by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping.”