eGODs
and ancient impersonal malice.
I have an ex-boyfriend who read Proust as an act of self-aggrandisement. All several thousand pages of Lost Time. He went in search thereof.
A busy man, he liked to imagine himself a secret lord of leisure, with nothing but hours to spend reading Proust in the bath.
He took from this, I think, the satisfaction that reading Proust in his scant leisure hours signified that he was in fact a man of culture and learning, despite his mind-numbing day job.
It was a currency: big book energy, on dates and in chit-chat outside conference rooms, as a cultured stand-in for big dick energy.
Big book energy as the new big dick energy.
Big book brandishment as a competitive act. Competitive reading.
It’s rife online. Have you read Infinite Jest? Don’t even look at me sideways if you haven’t.
I’ve read all the big books: my dick is HUGE.
Did you get all the way through Don DeLillo’s Underworld?
How about the dense 300 or so pages of woman-slaughter at the heart of 2666? Did you read every bloody page? (I didn’t.)
And of course: War and Peace, Middlemarch, Bleak House?
But lately I’ve noticed a new thing. Big book energy isn’t the only big dick energy anymore.
Lately, there’s a new vibe.
NO book energy, as touted by Kanye and other leading lights of this TLDR age.
Fuck reading, and people who do it.
Waste of time, sunk costs, trim the fat.
Private equitize. Optimize. Do more with less.
Who’s got time to pick up a novel? Fire them.
I read no books. My dick is huge.
TLDR but then whoops, just fired the people who keep planes in the skies and guardrails on the nuke stores.
Whoops! Soz, TLDR.
Egads. Egods.
Say it backwards, say it forwards. I can fuck about with words too! Egod, doge-god dog-E.
We live in the TLDR age of eGods.
Would-be gods. Ego’d, evil-doing, wannabe gods.
The gods of No Book.
Now, I’m not religious, just to lead with that right off the bat. I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve been in a place of worship (and that was only for weddings or used book sales).
My places of worship are libraries.
I’ve long understood the idea of “god” to be wrapped up in the power of the written word.
Stay with me.
I’ll try not to get too Mister Rogers but there is an important point to be made here.
To make it, we need to go back to basics.
What happens when you read?
Reading is the exercise of hearing someone else’s voice in your head: a divine voice that is separate from you but somehow sounds, magically, inside your skull.
It is a religious experience, the ultimate religious experience, when you first read a page and hear someone else’s thoughts in your head.
A total stranger speaks in your brain, in your most intimate part: behind the eyeballs.
And you feel, suddenly, less alone.
The power of the written word—intrinsic in the act of reading and stepping into another body—was long ago hijacked and conflated with “god”.
God’s word in the Book, etc.
“God” is the one who is everywhere, sees everything, at once, from everyone’s eyes at the same time. “God” is the repository of memories, the three-eyed raven (yes, I re-watched Game of Thrones recently, it’s great).
And? What are books? If every person who ever lived had recorded for us their innermost thoughts and experiences, is “god” really anything more than … all their books? The collective, simultaneous perspective, knowledge and understanding of every human who lives and ever has lived? The ability to see from all their eyes at once?
Literacy got hijacked.
The Word, the Book. Except actually just worshipping the power of a book, any written word. Venerating the magic of surpassing your own bodily limits, stepping beyond your own experiences, communing with the consciousness of another.
That is magic. Venerate it rightly.
Moses came down from the mount with the written Word? Perhaps. Words endure and are passed down. “God” speaks, in voices of the long-dead.
Miracles occur. Resurrection too. Through the words we leave behind, we can be brought back to life.
Goethe lives again, hundreds of years on, when his words nest in my brain.
“Was it a god who made this mystic scroll,
To touch my spirits tumult with its healing,
And fill my wretched heart with joyous feeling,
And bring the secret world before my soul,
The hidden drive of Nature’s force revealing?
Myself a god?”
Words are the ultimate power: with them, influence—and immortality.
Which explains why literacy was kept under lock and key, only for a few isolated monks, until boom! The Reformation blasted it all apart and allowed anyone to read and interpret words on a page.
The magic became available to anyone: hear someone else in your head, see things that never happened to you, with a freshness as if they were happening again, right now!
That is omnipresence.
It’s not possible, of course.
Most people who lived left no trace of their thoughts. They left nothing behind: not a word or a scrap. No life litter at all. They lived and breathed and died. Their voices faded to wordsmoke and we are none the wiser as to what they dreamed or thought or felt.
But if they did leave something behind? Well, reading all their books—all the books of the dead—would be as close as you’d ever get to playing omnipresent “god”.
Plato thought long and hard about the perfect state. His conclusion was that the ideal ruler would be a philosopher-king.
Or philosopher-doge, if you will.
Reading gives you a perspective other than your own. It generates empathy for others: the ability to imagine what it might feel like behind another set of eyes.
Not a bad trait in a ruler.
It is surely no coincidence that one of the central messages of the Book too is one of empathy.
Do unto others ...
That’s what books do: imbue empathy in the reader.
But here’s the rub: philosophers don’t want to be kings—and men want to be gods.
Today’s men want to be eGods.
They want to see inside everyone’s heads via the content of phones and unbroken internet presence. Give us your metrics, your data, they say.
The extra fuzz, the shades of grey, are unimportant.
They can see a lot but they can’t see everything.
Our eGods tell themselves that the missing bits don’t matter.
They are omnipotent, because to know what moves someone—what ads they’ll click on, what bait they’ll rage on—is to control them.
All-powerful.
Fuck reading novels, they say. You can be king without being a philosopher. That extra bit behind the eyes isn’t measurable or important.
I really enjoyed
interviewing recently (frankly, a live-stream of Mills at the grocery store would be more entertaining than most of the shit on TV but I digress) and my favourite bit hands-down was when she said, ok, so why read novels? Like, what is the actual value of reading novels?That this can even be a question is incredible—but then I realised she’s right: it actually makes sense to ask.
Skepticism re the value of novels is exactly where we’ve landed in the discourse of the eGods.
It’s the TLDR vibe shift of post-literate Kanye. It’s the reaction-based aesthetic, isolated and individual, that doesn’t seek to commune with any other mind except via likes, hearts and shares.
It’s the private equity mentality of an accountant that sums up the wet sales of my village pub and determines a value of X—while ignoring the incalculable, intangible value of social space.
Quantify the value of reading novels?
Empathy.
Transcending our limited selves.
Escaping the ancient impersonal malice of survival.
Loosening the tight, insecure hold on the sacrosanctity of our identity and remembering that other people are just like us, warts and all.
That is the point.
The real question is, in this life, if you have the luxury of time, what is the point of not reading novels?
To stay locked ever-deeper inside your own psyche only? In just one body? With just one set of experiences?
To live without empathy, to merely endure others? To become comfortable with their status as other, monstrous, not really human like you?
And, eventually, to justify gross and ever-grosser violences upon them?
Beware.
Beware those who want the value-add quantified. Who measure value-add in page count, skills acquired, salary increased.
Beware those who burn books or ban books or want to tell you reading is “elitist”, fuck readers.
These are the people who will lockstep in time to atrocities, because they have never ventured from behind their own eyeballs.
They have only one perspective. They have moral certainty, terrifying clarity, in no way suffused with shades of grey.
Put a great novel in their hands, if you can. Doesn’t need to be a big one.
Help them to see the magic; help them get behind another set of eyeballs, if you can.
Empathy is undervalued by the eGods.
The very best stuff isn’t measurable.
Because of that, there’s an awful lot they can’t see.
The eGods can extrapolate quite a bit about what I’m feeling from my phone.
What messages I send. What I search for. Where I go.
Maybe a clever eye glass will eventually track my eye movements. Work out what holds my attention.
But the mystery of what exactly is happening behind my eyeballs will remain … a mystery.
Unless I choose to communicate it like this: in words, set down, with as much lucidity as I can manage.
And you choose to read it.
Thank you, Jill, you made me think. Again.
I'm wondering if eGODs undervalue empathy, or fear it? If that's why the book-banning? They're afraid that we'll empathize with the wrong people, or worse, with ourselves.
I was infinitely distressed when I first encountered what I guess I might call "bad faith" literary sorts; I'd been so excited to escape the non-literate or anti-literate scenes that I was unprepared for all the wretched dynamics literate / literary scenes can have. It's now a toss-up for me whether I'd rather be around people like the fella you mention —egoistic readers, competitive readers, extractive or exploitative "readers"— or people who just don't read at all.
I will say optimistically that I love the incapacity of eGods to even perceive what they cannot measure. I believe in the import of much that cannot be measured, and that the import is non-negotiable: you *cannot* have a good, accurate, predictive model of reality without it; your life *will* be a mess, your understanding of "what works on Earth" incomplete; and that means that these people eat shit, often! And the scarier world is one in which they do not eat shit: where it's possible to ignore all that cannot be measured and still succeed. It's not, and thank goodness: it's an inevitable check. You often see this in their family lives, and for all the damage they can do, I don't think anyone who fails to pursue love, fails to take into account all that literature (and other things) are about, can be happy, or can even be persistently successful. In other words: it's a check on their power, and I feel lucky that any such check exists.