The classic act of reading, of literacy, presumes three possibilities. Silence: the availability of silence, when today silence has become the most expensive luxury, when even in the new expensive apartments, the walls are thin. When the fear of silence is such that you cannot even step into an elevator in New York without the muzak oozing on. They explain that people are frightened of silence, frightened to be alone. Silence has become almost unattainable. Children are afraid of it. We are enveloped by constant noise. Privacy, which is related to silence, requires being unafraid to be alone. On the contrary, one covets it, seeks it out; one does not know that nonsense phrase, “peer pressure.” There is no pressure except that of one’s own integrity and concentration. Malebranche, as quoted by Heidegger over and over again, said, "Concentration is the natural piety of the soul." To be able to concentrate totally. You cannot read a difficult text without total concentration.

America – and this is not an anti-American comment (I hate that sort of cheapness) – is more honest of its disasters than we are in Europe. The latest statistic is that over eighty percent of American adolescents cannot read in silence without some kind of music in the background. Also quite terrifying is the flicker effect at the edge of their vision, the television. What this does to the cortex we haven’t begun to understand. It would need extensive psychological and social examination of the current experience of solitude as punitive and traumatic, of the shortening of the attention span among the young and adults.

It would be sentimental nonsense to think that we can officially recreate the foundations of the classic act of literacy. Pythagoras and Plato intuited, and Galileo demonstrated that, to quote his famous saying, “Nature speaks mathematics.” Since Galileo and Newton, that speech has become the ever-expanding idiom of a scientific and technological handling of the world. It is the lingua franca of the reality principle. Verbal and written languages cover less and less of verifiable, evolving experience. No aspect, no single facet of our lives, inward and outward, will be unchanged by the three horizons now looming. I owe this, of course, not to any competence on my part but I have had the privilege of living among the great scientists. Heidegger used to say if you are really stupid, you tell a story. I confess to that guilt. Recently we had a truly delightful American guest at the high table of my college. He had been for a holiday in Scandinavia and, in the nicest way, he was saying to us, "I hope all of you do that. It is the nicest, friendliest place on earth." And he turns to a very shy, gray-haired colleague sitting next to him. “Have you been to Stockholm?” My colleague, keeping his head down, said, "Once." The guest didn’t understand, and we were so shy for the guest that we rapidly covered it with conversation. We didn’t want him to be embarrassed. My colleague had not meant to be clever or arrogant, God knows. He was simply being accurate. Of course, when you say “once” in Cambridge to the question “have you been to Stockholm,” you have gone for the Nobel. That is what I call the aristocracy of the mind; that is what I want to live among, and have been lucky to be able to do.