Likes Remembrance of Things Past.

Transcript context

…If someone says, well, today, European literature — it’s alive and well and flourishing. There’s Knausgård, there’s Elena Ferrante, many other fine authors, Submission by Houellebecq. Do you agree? Aren’t we living in a wonderful time for the written word? A kind of renaissance of literature? I’d go further than that. I do read an enormous amount. I don’t like very, very long books, like the Danish author Knausgård. The only very long book I like is Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. You can read that for your entire life, [laughs] in a way, and on and off in bits. I never read it from beginning to end, I have to admit that, but I will continue it. On the whole, I don’t like long. I would go further than that, Tyler. You might find this surprising. I’m a great fan of film as an art form. I think even what might be called popular films, even TV is in a golden age, I would say now. If I think of the series I’ve enjoyed in recent years — Breaking Bad, True Detective, British series of various kinds, some of the great historical — I think they weren’t made, couldn’t be made for various reasons. New technologies have made them even better in some respects than before, so that is a great thing. I’m in the process of shifting over from physical books. I’ll keep a few, but I’m getting rid of thousands of books now for various reasons. Literally thousands to Kindle. I’ve got thousands and thousands on Kindle already. The reason for that is partly practical because I can carry it around with me. I can go on holiday and have all these books with me without any difficulty at all. Also, beyond that, if they’re books connected with my writing, I can search them very easily, rather than spending two hours of a finite lifetime — I’m 75, so it’s more finite than it used to be — searching for a particular phrase or sentence. I can find it instantly, so that’s a very good thing. Also, now with the quality of the printing and of the formatting and of the illustrations and art, it’s very, very high. That’s progress, too. Remember, I’ve never argued that progress doesn’t occur. I’ve benefited myself from anesthetic dentistry. I benefited quite recently, just a few months ago, from cataract surgery. Wonderful things. But my argument is that progress, actually, even of the scientific and technological kind, can always be reversed, and often is when there is a general civilizational collapse. I should say, by the way, I’ve often contrasted science and technological process with ethical and political process, and said that the former — scientific and technological — is exponential in a way that improvement or progress in ethics and politics isn’t. That’s more entropic. There are people who I respect greatly, like Peter Thiel, who have argued that, even in science and technology, this is more of an age of stagnation than we commonly think, that groupthink and various types of institutional follow-up have limited creativity. That actually, even, you might call the paradigmatic [laughs] forms of cumulative advance, which is what progress is. Progress isn’t just a brief period, a blip when things get a bit better, and then they stop being better and get worse. he paradigmatic [laughs] forms of cumulative advance, which is what progress is. Progress isn’t just a brief period, a blip when things get a bit better, and then they stop being better and get worse. Progress means that what has been achieved on the past is largely retained as the process of improvement goes on. That’s generally true in science and technology. Of course, if you look at the whole span of the last 3,000 years, there have been many periods in which technologies and skills and knowledge have been lost. That could happen again, I think. Ethical and political progress is much more fragile than that, but it does occur. And sometimes technological progress can improve human lives a lot, not just in medical context or dental context. By the way, Thomas de Quincey, the celebrated opium addict, writing in his book, said — I can never remember if it’s a quarter or a third — but he said, I think, either a quarter or a third of all human suffering was toothache, which is true. It was probably true at that time, or might have been true anyway. Definitely not true now. I share that view. They can even increase new methods of filming and streaming of films and so on, and increase the aesthetic qualities of life, because they’ve made it much easier for someone sitting in a study, as I do, to have access to beautiful forms of film art. I think, in what people conventionally think of with ethics and politics, it’s always a good idea to expect the worst to come back. It’s always a good idea to think that among the competing memes, it will be the memes that are the most vicious and the most toxic which will win. I think that’s happening now in the world, actually.…

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