When a thirteen year-old girl with the code name Genie arrived at the Department of Public Social Services (DPSS) office in Monrovia, California, in 1977, she walked – no, she negotiated space – with her arms extended in front of her. Her father had kept her locked in a room twenty-four hours a day, strapped to a potty seat in the daytime and to her bed at night. No one spoke to her – ever. She had no toys. She never went outside, never looked outside. No illumination in her room. She had no language. She also had no depth perception. She moved through the world, not with her mouth and mind, but with her arms and hands. Kasper Hauser, too, a young boy who emerged from the forest in early nineteenth-century Germany, experienced reality in two dimensions. He knew only grunts and groans. The world, he later reported, looked like someone had tossed buckets of coloured paint against the wall. Think about diagramming sentences – grammar suspends sentences in space. A distance separates subject from verb from object. Barely visible from where we stand at the subject end of the sentence, far out there waits the lonely, dependent object.

In that space, thoughts move. In that space, ideas work themselves out. That mentalized, interiorized space gets generated in the act of silent reading. Silent of course misstates the case, because internal vocalization excites images in just the way singing excites angels. Why not think of angels and images as similar – messengers from another world? I set my ideas in motion through excitement. Excitement gets me going.

Excitement is movement. Movement – motion, e-motion – requires an excitation. For me, this occurs most powerfully in reading. As a preparation for entertaining an entire range of emotions, young people get their training in orality – in stories that they hear out loud, that they make up themselves, in being read to out loud, in reading out loud to themselves, in reading silently, and finally, hopefully, in their desire to write their own stories. Wordsworth’s walking, talking ramble with his sister Dorothy in his poem “The Prelude” has the same spatial, mobile, emotional drive, as Dante’s circular stroll on his way to Paradise. Emerson takes his talk outside in his famous essay “Walking.” One space – exterior – maps onto another – interior. Against a backdrop of a deeply personal, idiosyncratic orality, electronic technology works to sever the nexus of language that young people need and enjoy so much.