writing

# 3026

The ability of a chatbot to outdo my (imaginary) research assistants, never a spelling nor grammatical error and open to more broad boundaries from recent reading than my assistant, stir this thought -

Words cannot change anything now. The soup we are in is too entropic, formless, without structure and can not easily be structured A writer needs readers sho actually read and reflect, take in, absorb, and assimilate, and there are too few to make a difference. I am struck by how really great thinking - and there is alot of it - does not propagate. A NYT best-seller printing can fit on a forklift.

I’ve been reading Bruno Latour’s Critical Zones, a museum sized beautiful and fairly expensive book. Who has read it? ”We are pushed by forces stronger than we are, like competing kites in the wind.”

I’ve been reading Toynbee’s Study of History with his exploration of why societies survive or not. And Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with beautiful passages of what Rome was at times peaceful and civilized, passages that moved people like Jefferson and Hamilton, that we mostly no longer read.