am I when I am involved in a book? --Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies You're in cyberspace. --Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired magazine, responding to Birkerts in the Harper's Magazine Forum, Are We Doing Online? (August 1995) I have before my eyes a page, and on the page, typewritten in a serif font, is a poem. It is an ode written in 1819 by John Keats. I read the first words aloud to myself, slowly, pronouncing each syllable as though it were a musical note or a percussive beat: Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness, /Thou foster-child of silence and slow time. As I continue down the page, I linger over certain phrases and rhymes; I go back and re-read, taking the stanzas apart and putting them back together again in my mind. The words fall into their order, and I feel their rhythm somewhere in my chest, the resonance of language uttered by a human voice in solitude. I am forced back into myself by the words on the page, my mind pushed deeper and deeper into a realm of images and associations, and emotion that did not exist a moment before is conjured from some mysterious wellspring. I repeat the last lines of the poem--an indecipherable pronouncement on the relation of art to life--and then a noise from outside draws my attention to the open window; the spell is broken. It is a sultry Sunday afternoon over the rooftops of Boston's Back Bay, and through the window of my office a humid breeze rustles the papers strewn across my desk. I notice the clock: nearly five hours have elapsed since I sat down to read, and in that time I've wandered through a collection of British poetry. It seemed like no time at all. As I stand up to stretch, there's the sensation of floating that I often experience after long immersion in literature. But the pressure of the world returns, and its gravity pulls me back. The shock of reentering the temporal zone leaves me a little dazed, disoriented. I am still inside that Keats poem. Or it is inside me--that experience proved upon my pulse, which, by the way, is beating somewhat more rapidly than normal. Where have I been? What has happened to the sense of time and space that governed my consciousness before I came upon that text? Something has happened, something connecting me across space and time to another human being, perhaps untold others--some experience of language that is ageless, primal, and indefinable. Perhaps I have had what some would call an authentic aesthetic experience of the art of poetry. If so, then I have experienced it directly through the digital channels of the Internet, on of the World Wide Web, through the circuitry of an Apple computer and the cathodes of a Sony monitor, at some 28,000 bytes per second. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I hope Sven Birkerts will take the preceding paragraphs not only as a rebuttal but as a compliment. His most recent collection of essays, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, is one of the most engrossing, engaging, provocative, and frustrating books I've come across in a long while. Published in December, 1994, on the cusp of the millennial hype surrounding the so-called online revolution, it has become one of the most talked about literary events of the past year. There should be nothing mysterious about its notoriety. At a time when the subject of the Internet and the new media it has spawned is everywhere you look--not just in the pages of Wired magazine but on the covers and in the headlines of the very print publications these new media are said to be replacing--Birkerts strikes deeply and often convincingly to the core of an anxiety felt by many in our postmodern literary culture. The strategy is simple and rather brilliant: to explore the relationship between a reader and an imaginative text at a time when serious literature is increasingly marginalized by the communications technologies that are transforming mass media and mass culture. …