12
PARTISAN KEVIEW
no history, and above all is totally incurious. Quite a large number of my
young friends are like this. They're all utterly delightful. We have a won–
derful time together. We gossip, we go shopping. We chat about our
friends, but at the slightest mention of anything literary their eyes glaze
over. Looking back at my misspent youth, I can remember people who
were not particularly literary. They were not even very educated, but they
would take it for granted that they should have read
War and Peace.
They
did not say, "Oh this is so difficult. Oh this is too long and I don't under–
stand the long words." They just read it. That's what people were like
then.
So as not
to
bore you by quoting hundreds more examples of this, I'm
going
to
talk about the reasons for this phenomenon. One is so familiar to
us that we take it for granted: that is that every child in Western culture,
particularly in Britain and this country, has been brought up with a half–
minute attention span. I've been watching tel evi sion in
111
y hotel bedroom
and it's broken up more than it was before. You can't bear it. Your brain
starts complaining. Now all the kids have been brought up like this. They
take it for granted, moving from one channel to another. They all do,
everywhere. Something happened when I came in by plane, and I'm sure
it has happened to everyone else. British Airways thought that we would
not be able to endure fifteen minutes of silence during the time it would
take to park at the gate so they started playing Mozart. It wasn't proper
Mozart. It was
sound bites
from Mozart. The beautiful little bits. Each time
music came back on and then they said "Please don't loosen your seat–
belts," and then they said, "Have a good day ," and then they said, "Thank
you for flying with British Airways," and there was the music, which in
itself was broken up. 13y the time all that had been done I felt perfectly
sick. Because it hurts. We have all got used to this. We don't complain. I
don't know why we don't. The question is, what is it doing to our minds?
Now, short attention spans and continual switching from one level to
another-is it possible that it is contributing physically to the triviality that
we complain of? The other night I heard a young man with a small child
say that the programs made for very small children are deliberately broken
up. He was concerned because these programs are no longer continuous
narratives. They are all in little bits. The child's brain is being conditioned
to operate like that.
Now here ['m going to raise an enormous question, just to throw it
away. It is my belief that we value narrative because the pattern is in our
brain. Our brains are patterned for story telling, for the consecutive. I'm
sure of it. I mean, there is nowhere else this pattern could be but in our
brains: it doesn't come from outer space. The pattern is being broken up
all the time, which means the substance of our brains is being attacked by
