I’ve been spending a lot of time in the local (St. Catharines) 24-hour Starbucks, where there is wi-fi and a constant slew of people, students to retirees, most with computers, banging away at assignments or blogs or novels or who-knows-what.
Also where i tripped across an apt quote from Czech-born author Milan Kundera, foreseeing our world of ceaseless personal output and minimal input. From his 1978 Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
The irresistible proliferation of graphomania among politicians, taxi drivers, childbearers, lovers, murderers, thieves, prostitutes, officials, doctors, and patients shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: “We are all writers!”
For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.
One morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.
Yep, we’re living it!
Greg Blee 