Losing the Thread

The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society b y James Marriott; Doubleday, 208 pp., $28

《新黑暗时代：阅读的死亡与后文学社会的黎明》作者：詹姆斯·马里奥特； Doubleday，208 页，28 美元

As reading habits wane, we devotees of books rally to one another like the exiles on the train tracks in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.

随着阅读习惯的减弱，我们这些书籍爱好者就像雷·布拉德伯里（Ray Bradbury）的《华氏 451》中铁轨上的流亡者一样聚集在一起。

Those noble book memorizers defied their dystopian darkness.

那些高尚的书本记忆者反抗着他们的反乌托邦黑暗。

“They weren’t at all certain that the things they carried in their heads might make every future dawn glow with a purer light,” Bradbury writes.

布拉德伯里写道：“他们根本不确定他们头脑中携带的东西是否会让未来的每一个黎明都发出更纯净的光芒。”

Yet this “odd minority crying in the wilderness” saved books for the hoped-for readers to come.

然而，这个“在荒野中哭泣的奇怪的少数人”却为那些希望到来的读者保留了书籍。

Since we fugitive readers are often in need of consolation, I’ll note that on the same day James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages was published, William Vollmann’s five-volume, 3,000-page novel A Table for Fortune was also released.

由于我们逃亡的读者经常需要安慰，我要指出的是，在詹姆斯·马里奥特的《新黑暗时代》出版的同一天，威廉·沃尔曼的五卷本、3000页的小说《财富之桌》也出版了。

We can meet on the train tracks to discuss it.

我们可以在火车轨道上见面讨论这个问题。

Many worried voices cry out in our own wilderness.

在我们自己的荒野中，有许多忧心忡忡的声音在呼喊。

This past summer, articles in Fortune and The Chronicle of Higher Education despaired of college students who can’t read long texts or finish a book, while The Atlantic ’s Rose Horowitch announced, “The End of Reading Is Here.” The subtitle of Marriott’s book darkens the “end” of reading as its “death.” Surely that’s premature and hyperbolic.

去年夏天，《财富》和《高等教育纪事报》上的文章对无法阅读长篇文章或读完一本书的大学生感到绝望，而《大西洋月刊》的罗斯·霍洛维奇则宣布，“阅读的终结已经到来”。马里奥特这本书的副标题将阅读的“终结”暗化为阅读的“死亡”。当然，这还为时过早且夸张。

But overstatement is prophecy’s mode, and there is plenty for prophets to be anxious about.

但夸大其词是预言的模式，先知们担心的事情有很多。

Marriott’s first task is to show us how much is lost when older modes of reading are displaced.

万豪的首要任务是向我们展示当旧的阅读模式被取代时会损失多少。

His is a brief book that moves quickly from the rise of literacy as an elite practice that enabled the growth of civilizations, to the acceleration of text production following Gutenberg’s printing press, to the era of mass literacy which tracked the growth of modern democracies.

他是一本简短的书，内容迅速从扫盲作为一种精英实践的兴起，促进了文明的发展，到古腾堡印刷机之后文本生产的加速，再到追随现代民主国家发展的大众扫盲时代。

One of Marriott’s core contentions is that democracies require literate populations—not simply because people need to be able to read voting ballots but because the act of reading provides the kind of deliberative, rational practice that complex societies require to self-govern.

马里奥特的核心论点之一是，民主国家需要识字人口——不仅仅是因为人们需要能够阅读选票，还因为阅读行为提供了复杂社会自治所需的审慎、理性的实践。

He acknowledges that the spread of books and newspapers in the past wasn’t all Federalist Papers and Oliver Twist , that “the age of print was also the age of Nostradamus, witch-hunts and supernatural fantasies,” but all in all, like the saucer that cools the tea, the culture of reading made society “a better and more rational place.”

他承认，过去书籍和报纸的传播并不全是《联邦党人文集》和《雾都孤儿》，“印刷时代也是诺查丹玛斯、政治迫害和超自然幻想的时代”，但总而言之，就像冷却茶的碟子一样，阅读文化使社会“成为一个更好、更理性的地方”。

Marriott believes that this age is already behind us.

万豪相信这个时代已经过去了。

Here, he follows Neil Postman, whose now-classic Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) saw the transition from the era of the “typographic mind” to the era of electronic media, which has brought forth the “vast triviality” of cultural life.

在这里，他追随尼尔·波兹曼的脚步，后者的经典之作《自娱自乐至死》（Amusing Ourselves to Death，1985）见证了从“印刷思维”时代到电子媒体时代的转变，电子媒体时代带来了文化生活的“巨大琐碎性”。

In this new screen-centered world, readers became viewers.

在这个以屏幕为中心的新世界中，读者成为了观众。

Chapter breaks became detergent commercials.

章节休息变成了洗涤剂广告。

Postman told us we were wrong to have worried about George Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia.

波兹曼告诉我们，我们担心乔治·奥威尔的极权主义反乌托邦是错误的。

Instead, it was Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that showed the ease with which we would simply give ourselves away to amusement and distraction.

相反，奥尔德斯·赫胥黎（Aldous Huxley）的《美丽新世界》展示了我们如何轻松地将自己投入娱乐和消遣之中。

“Big Brother,” Postman quipped, “turns out to be Howdy Doody.”

“老大哥，”波斯特曼打趣道，“原来是霍迪·杜迪。”

While Marriott sees the later advent of the smartphone as the real death knell for reading, he helpfully documents the longer genealogy of screen enchantment.

虽然马里奥特将后来智能手机的出现视为阅读的真正丧钟，但他也很有帮助地记录了屏幕魅力的更长谱系。

In addition to television broadly, he also explores the launch of 24-hour news with CNN and the invention of the remote control, which he dubs “the original addictive portable entertainment device.” Channel surfing taught our fingers how to scroll.

除了广泛的电视之外，他还探索了 CNN 24 小时新闻的推出以及遥控器的发明，他将其称为“原始的令人上瘾的便携式娱乐设备”。频道冲浪教会了我们的手指如何滚动。

Television itself marked the beginning of organizing our needs around a screen.

电视本身标志着我们开始围绕屏幕组织我们的需求。

It taught us to think of “entertainment not as a diversion but as a constant feature of our lives.”

它教会我们“娱乐不是一种消遣，而是我们生活的一个持续特征”。

Postman died before the iPhone arrived and before what Marriott calls (in a nod to Martin Amis, Saul Bellow, and Wyndham Lewis) “the moronic inferno of social media” could confirm his prophecies.

波兹曼在 iPhone 到来之前就去世了，在马里奥特所说的（向马丁·艾米斯、索尔·贝娄和温德姆·刘易斯致敬）“社交媒体的白痴地狱”能够证实他的预言之前。

With more landscape to survey, Marriott asserts that it’s all much worse than Postman imagined: “It is not just that twenty-first century society lacks seriousness, it also seems to be growing dangerously chaotic and irrational.” He goes on: “I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal and autocratic.” In her Atlantic essay, Horowitch offered a similarly bleak framing: “The literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.” When defenders of ruminative reading start pulling the alarms, perhaps it really does signify the end of something .

随着更多的景观需要调查，马里奥特断言，一切比波兹曼想象的要糟糕得多：“二十一世纪的社会不仅缺乏严肃性，而且似乎还变得危险的混乱和非理性。”他继续说道：“我相信我们可能会发现自己面临着一个类似于前文字时代的后文字时代的未来：神秘的、部落的和独裁的。”霍洛维奇在《大西洋月刊》的文章中提出了类似的悲观框架：“文字时代将被证明是口头时代和数字时代之间的短暂插曲。”当沉思式阅读的捍卫者开始拉响警报时，也许这确实意味着某件事的结束。

But we can’t scold ourselves away from our screens.

但我们不能责备自己远离屏幕。

We have to help convince each other that there is something better offscreen, that difficult habits and tasks are somehow preferable to easier rewards.

我们必须帮助彼此相信银幕之外还有更好的东西，困难的习惯和任务在某种程度上比更容易的奖励更可取。

This sounds calm enough on the page.

这在页面上听起来足够平静。

To humble the confident moralist, Marriott quotes a Google whistleblower on the real conditions of the struggle: “You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.”

为了让这位自信的道德家感到谦卑，马里奥特引用了一位谷歌举报者的话来描述这场斗争的真实情况：“你可以尝试自我控制，但屏幕另一边有一千名工程师在与你作对。”

Still, lapsed readers, young and old, will have to be convinced of the worth to be found in quiet hours spent with Moby-Dick or Middlemarch.

尽管如此，那些已经流失的读者，无论年轻还是年老，都必须相信在《白鲸》或《米德尔马契》中度过安静时光的价值。

They will have to glimpse a reverie and wisdom that simply cannot be attained through passive watching of a video or a scroll through AI summaries.

他们必须瞥见一种遐想和智慧，这是被动观看视频或滚动浏览人工智能摘要所无法获得的。

They will need to sense that some rewards are deeper and better than others.

他们需要感觉到某些奖励比其他奖励更深刻、更好。

Marriott quotes Gurwinder Bhogal’s observation that screens are offering “a kind of fast food for thought.” But if screens don’t nourish us, still they please us.

万豪引用了古温德·博加尔（Gurwinder Bhogal）的观察，即屏幕正在提供“一种思考的快餐”。但即使屏幕不能滋养我们，它们仍然能让我们高兴。

Fast food is popular for a reason.

快餐之所以受欢迎是有原因的。

“We have everything we need to be happy,” the hero of Fahrenheit 451 observes, “but we aren’t happy.” Maybe that’s the ultimate lever to pull: the growing awareness that our devices are exhausting and eroding us.

《华氏 451 度》的主人公说：“我们拥有幸福所需的一切，但我们并不幸福。”也许这就是最终的杠杆：人们越来越意识到我们的设备正在耗尽并侵蚀我们。

Maybe our own nausea will help turn us away from the misdirection of those Google engineers.

也许我们自己的恶心会帮助我们摆脱那些谷歌工程师的误导。

At the end of his skeptical assessment of our milieu, Marriott’s portrayal of an emptiness is, paradoxically, a seam of light on the horizon: “The problem, we are discovering, is that to immerse yourself in nothing but distraction is not a recipe for a happy or meaningful life.” When we look up from our distractions, though, convinced of that emptiness, what will we decide to look to?

在对我们的环境进行怀疑性评估的最后，马里奥特对空虚的描述，矛盾的是，地平线上的一线曙光：“我们发现，问题在于，除了分心之外什么都不沉浸在其中，并不是幸福或有意义的生活的秘诀。”然而，当我们从干扰中抬起头来，确信这种空虚时，我们会决定看什么？

For most of The New Dark Ages , I thought I was holding on to more optimism than Marriott.

在《新黑暗时代》的大部分时间里，我认为自己比万豪更乐观。

Reading is not dead.

读书并没有死。

It’s just shouted down for the moment by short-term noise and vertical videos.

它只是暂时被短期噪音和垂直视频压制住了。

The remnant holds on.

剩下的还坚持着。

Marriott holds on, too.

万豪也坚持了下来。

This book is a voice crying in the wilderness, telling us not just what we’re missing but why it matters.

这本书是荒野中哭泣的声音，不仅告诉我们我们错过了什么，还告诉我们为什么它如此重要。

He concludes with this resonant affirmation:

他以这一引起共鸣的肯定作为结束语：

In an age that has elevated entertainment almost to the status of the highest possible value, books, especially good books, remind us that there is more to life.

在这个几乎将娱乐提升到最高价值的时代，书籍，尤其是好书，提醒我们生活还有更多。

…

……

Ironically, it may turn out that the best argument for reading ever invented was the smartphone.

具有讽刺意味的是，事实证明，有史以来最好的阅读论据可能是智能手机。

The smartphone has not shown us that books are obsolete.

智能手机并没有告诉我们书籍已经过时了。

It has shown us that books are irreplaceable.

它告诉我们，书籍是不可替代的。