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baring bone.
    “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” Whitman brags, “and what I assume you shall assume.” And the college practitioner of sonnets (myself at nineteen) hates him for being so free. At thirty, that same young writer, having grown old enough to praise, loves him. And for the very same exultant spirit she once hated.
    “A great writer modifies everything,” Anthony Burgess says in Re: Joyce. And it is natural that at first we hate those writers for modifying everything and changing our precious point of view. T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Henry Miller, D. H. Lawrence are great in proportion to their power to irritate. We know that Emily Dickinson is a great writer because she irritates us so on first reading: because she must mold us as an audience to read her, because she changes the conditions of verse, of language itself. She melts down the language as in a crucible and makes it into quite a new thing. She modifies everything.
    So it is not unusual to hate great writers before we learn to love them. Because they have created something that did not yet exist, they must also create their audience. Sometimes the audience is not yet ready. Sometimes it has yet to be born.
    I write all this balanced on a ledge of time before the end of the century. I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion. Books require readers and readers are rapidly becoming passé. Books require solitude and the new world of virtual reality booths and roboreaders abhors solitude.
    Mixed media will be the art of the future. Giant jukeboxes, with scanners or modems or faxes built in, will blaze at us from every wall and we will couple interactive “art” with electronic pencils or voice commands so as to eradicate solitude. CD ROM is the voice of the future. Cartoonovels are its eyes. Already the novels of Trollope, George Sand, not to mention Fielding or Smollett, are unreadable by most. Those fossils (like me) who worship the ghosts of Petronius and Rabelais are getting long in the tooth. And we tend, in truth, to worship more than read them.
    The generation that replaces us will be bewitched by electronic images that collage the works of all past ages without knowing or crediting their sources. Perhaps copyright will also pass away. Solitude surely will. And when these go, so inevitably will the Bill of Rights and the freedom of expression it promises. The meditative calm of one book/one reader will become a heresy, as Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World.
    We are more in danger of totalitarianism coming from appealing to the pleasure principle than from appealing to the death instinct—as Huxley also knew. And the world of the future will certainly be one in which people are controlled by omnipresent sensory input. All our battles of books will eventually seem quaint and inexplicable. Whether Henry Miller was a pornographer, a male chauvinist, or a Zen monk will seem utterly antique when the new mixed-media world arrives, since neither he nor anyone else will be read, there being no longer any real readers. If he is remembered it will be for his pop persona: the man who listed his free meals and rotated them through the nights of the week, the ultimate example of the man who came to dinner.
    But we are not yet in the postliterate world. And I still write for a few dying librophiliacs like myself. The violence of my love/hate for Miller shows that he did indeed have the power to move the brain molecules around. And that’s all the virtual reality machines and cartoonovels will be able to hope for: metamorphosing those molecules, rearranging by a nanometer the electrical charge of thoughts. The rest is silence. And radioactive dust.
    I belong to a generation for whom reading and writing are sacraments. Perhaps that is one of my ties to Miller and his younger contemporary, Lawrence Durrell.
    I went to see Lawrence