Will readers like us therefore need to become the literary equivalents of the Amish, living peacefully and slightly outside the technological world? Can reading and writing literature become our version of riding in horse-drawn buggies cantering peacefully down a car-jammed highway? Or do we simply need to accept new forms of art, whatever they might be, as when Bibles were first printed by the Gutenberg Press back in 1455, and a new bright vision arose from reading?
The four-color theorem is now widely accepted as a fact, but still a yearning lingers over it. A computer program that systematically analyzes reams of configurations doesn’t explain exactly why every map can be filled with four colors. Although mathematicians now welcome computers as partners in discovery, they still search today for a more illuminating proof of this colorful puzzle.
It was a little after 5:30 a.m., a cold dawn in June, and I was sitting on a meditation cushion in a big red barn in the Hudson Valley. A dozen other people sat with me in deep silence. Hundreds of birds began to sing in the meadows and trees. In the distance, we could hear livestock and machinery, the sounds of a working farm waking up.
I had not looked at an email, chat, headline, news alert or tweet for several days. What a strange situation for an editor who leads a breaking news team at The New York Times.
If the death of Boethius marked the end of an era, was Theoderic a benighted barbarian who kick-started the Middle Ages?
Or was he the last great custodian of antiquity? After all, the king had governed so adeptly for most of his three decades in power that many modern historians came to see his reign as a “golden age” — a time of prosperity made possible by a leader who apparently respected Roman culture more than many earlier Roman emperors did.