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Eliza Anderson's avatar

Thank you for shining light on what I internally grieve everyday .. this uncertain transition and effect on consciousness. This look at the past helps me

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Sal Randolph's avatar

These are strange times, indeed. I feel very aware after reading a lot of David Graeber (Towards an Anarchist Anthropology, The Dawn of Everything, and many others) that we can experience the past as a library of possibilities.

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Eliza Anderson's avatar

As afraid as I am of technology in this era .. ugh

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Sal Randolph's avatar

It makes me feel aware of all the changes my parents and grandparents lived through.

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Beatrice Marovich's avatar

I recently wrote something about the shift to silent reading (was thinking about Augustine’s sense of shock at seeing his mentor Ambrose reading silently), but didn’t know about the Illich book. Will seek that out, thank you! It’s interesting, for me, to think about what a social shift that must have been, for people who read, to suddenly see others internalize it, and retreat so clearly to an inner world, with their text. So many things were gained! But what was lost?

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Sal Randolph's avatar

I'll go find your piece! So much to consider about reading and interiority. I'm thinking of Michael Fried's classic, Absorption and Theatricality, about paintings of people reading and what they meant for the sense of personhood and the meaning of painting. Also I recently ran across a Substack post of women reading (by Meredith Lewis):

https://dangerousmeredith.substack.com/p/women-reading

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Beatrice Marovich's avatar

I love these images! There is something really singular in being caught up in another person’s experience of their interiority. I hope you write more about this! Here is the piece where I talk about silent reading, so you don’t have to dig:

https://open.substack.com/pub/beatricemarovich/p/what-if-we-lost-our-voice-a-long?r=53bab&utm_medium=ios

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Erica Weick's avatar

Thank you for this! So fruitful for the weavings of so many threads. I ask then, is artificial reminiscent of the trickster, the creator of artifice? and as such the pointer to random, new and different directions... or attentions? Loved Illich's "pilgrims of the pen"!

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Sal Randolph's avatar

Artificial is such a paradoxical word since it points to things we humans have made. It means human and inhuman at the same time. Definitely a trickster word!

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Erica Weick's avatar

Yes. In its original inception it can imply the making of art...

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