Here is another passage from the book from which I read on Friday; The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age
“The notion of historical change compels and vexes me. I am not so much interested in this war or that treaty or invention, although obviously these are critical factors. What I brood about has more to do with the phenomenology of everyday life. How is it that the world greets the senses differently–is experienced differently–form epoch to epoch. We know about certain ways in which the world has changed since, say, 1890, but do we know how the feeling of life has changed? We can isolate the more objective sorts of phenomena, cite improvements in transportation, industrial innovations, and so on, but we have no reliable access to the subjective realm. When older people sigh and say that “life was different back then,” we may instinctively agree, but how can we grasp exactly what that difference means? . . . . I am not in search of private sensation, but of a kind of understanding. I want to know what life may have been like during a certain epoch, what daily living may have felt like, so that I can make a comparison with the present. Why? I suppose because I believe that there is a secret to be found, a clue that will help me to solve the mystery of the present.”