I'm sure you could play some kind of computer game with veryintelligent, very small, invisible computers.... You could havesome entertaining way to play with them, or more likely theywould have some entertaining way to play with you. But thenimagine yourself growing up in that world, being born in thatworld. You could even be a computer game designer in that world,but how would you study the work of your predecessors? How wouldyou physically *access* and *experience* the work of yourpredecessors? There's a razor-sharp cutting edge in thisart-form, but what happened to all the stuff that got sculpted?

As I was saying, I don't think it's any accident that this ishappening.... I don't think that as a culture today we're veryinterested in tradition or continuity. No, we're a lot moreinterested in being a New Age and a revolutionary epoch, we longto reinvent ourselves every morning before breakfast and nevergrow old. We have to run really fast to stay in the same place.We've become used to running, if we sit still for a while itmakes us feel rather stale and panicky. We'd miss thosesixty-hour work weeks.

And much the same thing is happening to books today too.... Notjust technically, but ideologically. I don't know if you'refamiliar at all with literary theory nowadays, with terms likedeconstructionism, postmodernism.... Don't worry, I won't talkvery long about this.... It can make you go nuts, that stuff,and I don't really recommend it, it's one of those fields ofstudy where it's sometimes wise to treasure your ignorance....But the thing about the new literary theory that's remarkable,is that it makes a really violent break with the past.... Theseguys don't take the books of the past on their own culturalterms. When you're deconstructing a book it's like you'repsychoanalyzing it, you're not studying it for what it says,you're studying it for the assumptions it makes and the cultural