the din in the head
The inner life is the enemy of crowds, because the life of crowds snuffs the mind's murmurings. Mind is many-threaded, mazy, meandering, while every crowd turns out to be a machine--a collectivity of parts united as to a purpose. And with the ratcheting up of technology, every machine turns out to be a crowd. All these contemporary story-grinding contrivances and appliances that purport to capture, sometimes to mimic, the inner life--what are they, really, if not the brute extrusions of the principle of Crowd?...The very disappearance of telephone booths--those private cells for the whisperings of lovers and conspirators--serves the mentality of crowds, where ubiquitously public cell phones announce confidential assignations to the teeming streets.
The same angry fascination we have with our corners of the world being consumed (see Elizabeth's previous entry on the Foxes of Pennsylvania), can be turned full-wattage on our dwindling inner lives. The waters are getting shallow, we no longer have spooling landscapes OR big novels in which to escape from the crowd. Everywhere is an airport, you know?
I recommend Cynthia Ozick, any book will do, but this new one is electric, honeys. This is who I want to be when I grow up. A woman who calls the novel a "word-woven submarine" and understands the need to dive deep.