[In the following review, Rehder praises Birkerts's powers of persuasion in The Gutenberg Elegies, heeding the emphasis on the personal aspect of his thought.]

Second only to sex, the human mind seems concerned about books. Both can be all-consuming, and their decline has been seen as a sure sign that Western culture is coming to an end. What the nether areas of pornography are to sex, the new media of TV, hypertext, CDs, and the Internet are to books. According to Sven Birkerts, they are "masturbation aids" for the mind, except that these outcroppings of high technology don't make us think dirty thoughts; they just get us thinking. They also get Sven Birkerts writing, and what terrific writing it is! Yet it won't do just to call Birkerts a stylist of the highest order, steeped in the tradition of Lionel Trilling's liberal imagination. He does reach the depth of intellect and the height of sensibility that Trilling wrote about so eloquently. But Birkerts is not as indirect or "Jamesian" about his convictions, because he has seen the devil at the cross-roads more clearly than Trilling could 50 years ago. A vow to refuse the devil's temptations rather than a call for exorcism, these Elegies are about thinking and about ideas.

Ideas are not the sum and substance of thought; rather, thought is as much about the motion across the water as it is about the stepping stones that allow it. It is an intricate choreography of movement, transition, and repose, a revelation of the musculature of mind.

Birkerts is the author of American Energies (Morrow, 1992), The Electric Life (Morrow, 1989), and An Artificial Wilderness (Nonpareil Books.,1987), for which he received a National Book Critics Circle Award. These books show him as a sympathetic reviewer of poetry and fiction from the 19th and 20th centuries, some avant-garde, and many modern classics. He writes under the axiom that the best vehicle for thinking is our natural language, not the artifacts of technology. When our thinking condenses into ideas, there has been, for 500 years, an unsurpassed receptacle: the book. Now, though, Gutenberg's invention is suffering from neglect. A book is a lazy machine that requires a lot of collaboration. It doesn't do the thinking for us. As the Nintendo and MTV generation is asserting itself against Henry James, indications are, writes Birkerts, that James has lost already.

Birkerts states his case in loosely coupled essays that are held together by the theme of "reading and meaning." He begins with a highly personal ecology of reading. Moving on many paths toward the conclusion that a millennial transformation of society is upon us, he also celebrates the private joys of reading, of living with and out of books. Symptoms of this transformation, which he describes as a flattening, or trivialization, of intellectual life, are to be found in the rise of electronic communication with its promise of a fast, global, lateral connectedness, its emphasis on the "now." To collaborate properly with books, on the other hand, requires a slow and vertical immersion, a readiness for the experience of other worlds and of deeper time, of Bergson's "duration." Subsequent essays highlight the concrete dangers of the electronic age. Loss of a historical perspective, language erosion, and the waning of individuality seem to be the price we, the heirs of McLuhan, are ready to pay.

A coda, entitled "The Faustian Pact," epitomizes Birkerts' point. We are at a crossroads, he claims, and our tragedy lies in the fact that the decision has already been made. We are going down the road of the devil, the way of the "sorcerer of the binary order." What for Henry Adams was still an honest conflict between the forces of the mechanical machine and the virtues of faith and inwardness, a division of the world under the two metaphors of the Dynamo and the Virgin, has degenerated into a clear victory, without a fight, for the can-do boosterism of a hard-wired, computerized America over self-reflectiveness, privacy, solitude, and soul.

The Gutenberg Elegies are more authentic than Neil Postman's depressing threnodies (e.g., Amusing Ourselves to Death [Penguin, 1985] or Technopoly [Knopf, 1992]) and less self-righteous than Alvin Kernan's dirge about The Death of Literature (Yale, 1990). Not that Birkerts has newer data than Postman about the detrimental impact of TV on our attention span; nor does he subscribe to Kernan's miserly suspicion that leftist radicals are undermining the ivory tower. Birkerts' arguments are more convincing simply because they are so seductively personal. Personal does not mean merely subjective. The way Birkerts describes the reading experience—the "shadow life of reading," the existence of "the dreamy fellow with an open book on his lap" while surrounded by the never-ending hum of circuits processing trivial information through an invisible web—all this must be uncannily familiar to every committed reader. And yet I feel a residue of dissent. There is no denying that Birkerts' quiver of arguments contains many sharp arrows that are, like Cupid's, dipped in such a sweet poison of persuasion and passion and appeal that, once hit, we might want to give in to their narcotic effect. But we must resist falling in love with our own nostalgia. To paraphrase writer Robert Musil, it is a matter of mental hygiene to put the novel aside once in a while and solve a difficult integral. The number of rooms in our interior castle (where the soul reigns supreme) is larger than one. It is not enough to feed the soul an optimal dose of its recommended daily allowance of novels and poems. Such one-sided nutrition leads to hypertrophy of the fiction muscles. A more balanced diet does not, however, come from injections of the so-called reality or from ingesting the junk food of the mind that technological progress advertises and administers. More delicious mind-food is available in those other rooms in the interior castle. Their doors are labeled Music, Mathematics, Dancing, Playing, perhaps even Solving-Hard-Problems-in-Quantum-Mechanics. The human faculty that Henry James once called "the beautiful circuit of thought and desire" need not be restricted to fiction. His poles of "reality" and "romance" span a larger terrain than that of computers and novels, and Trilling's intellect and sensibility describe a wider realm in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in most lit majors' philosophy.

Thus speaks the rational skeptic in me. But in my more melancholy mood I hear deeper in The Gutenberg Elegies a most mesmeric music, and I shudder from the resonance these essays generate in my heart.