No wonder that, compared with moving pictures, pulsing pixels, and streaming videos, the word reading sounds terribly old fashioned and creaky. If the book moves, we as readers must make the letters dance. But try to explain that to a youngster. What to do? For it’s in reading that I’m convinced young people learn not just to exert some control over their world, but to re-shape it, as well. I want to conjure something better, more demanding, than “The Terminator.” I want to imagine something more hopeful than terror versus anti-terror. We must reach beyond good guys versus bad guys.

Manufactured, packaged and processed, technologically powered excitement is corrosive to lived experience. It has helped to rob the everyday and the mundane – the ordinary objects and events of daily life, the most commonplace of things – of their divine presence. More than that, the new velocity of narration, storytelling as a top-speed, extreme event, driven by special effects, stifles young people from telling their own stories. How can they compete with the perfect simulation of power? Just as Maria’s highly literate sisters imposed their rules on her, so electronic technology denies young people their own voice.

Young people are sleepwalking – deprived of the regularity of breathing, and the phenomenology of seeing that the deepest levels of orality promote. And orality is good at hiding its excitement: speaking, conversing, storytelling, all creep at a petty pace; ideas repeat themselves, double back on themselves. Events exist and do not exist; they’re true and not true. Kids troop about in a dreamy state. Sometimes nobody’s home, inspiration gets exhausted. The spirit flags.

Young people now expect the world to resemble in sight and sound a game of Doom or Sniper, or, perhaps knowing that it cannot, find lived experience a pale facsimile compared with the special effects version of it. The world and its copy have traded places, the simulation more powerful than the actual.

Excitement has replaced the richness of interior space. It’s an internalized thrill ride, excitement is, and it works best when the self has been weakened. The enjoyment of the supernatural, Coleridge said, demanded the willing suspension of disbelief; excitement requires no act so deliberate – willingness and suspension both beside the point.