A few words concerning your ideas on permanence and literature:
- Fire
- Flood
- Bugs
- Rot
- Spatial displacement
- Coffee stains
- Manual overrides
- Linguistic extinction
Please do not conflate the physicality of books with the permanence of the ideas contained within them.
These are my sentiments as well. I like Franzen, but he’s such an illogical worrier and tends to–as in this instance–get a little blowhardy.
I haven’t read any of Franzen’s books, even though Freedom has been on my Kindle for about a year now, so I can’t speak to his abilities as a writer.
I do know that this attitude that pops up here and there, that the future is somehow going to vanish in the blink of an eye is really fascinating to me. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing or what but one of the goals for this blog is to take a look at this ‘anti-permanence worrying’ and try to understand it a little better.