Consider the cultural legacies of the American and French Revolutions. There was an outpouring in those times of documents and declarations, pronouncements and polemics, the courageous rhetoric of rights and independence, aimed at an imaginative republic of readers. Our own guiding souls and intelligences were now the true kings and queens. Individual hunger and need led to the demands of a larger literate public. Old systems collapsed, crushed by the call for new representation. Leaflets, letters, newspapers, broadsides, pamphlets, novels, and satirical poems circulated: these formed key lifelines for the inner self and its longing for liberty and a responsive, open system.

In all these examples the solitary universe – the confidential realm, that soul admitting to itself – nevertheless longs for a receptive, transforming cosmos of the “loosened Spirit” with its “Bequest of Wings.”

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Now in our virtual venues, the televisual elecroscape, we are mesmerized by – and sometimes fireballed by – the next movement in the hidden phase of literacy: the cyber-revolution. Book people, like myself, sometimes squirm, often sneer, certainly worry, make dire pronouncements, or wail against “becoming digital,” like lost wilderness souls.

Let us say the cyber-revolution is the confirmation of the long struggle of consciousness – of the mind’s perpetual push from the inner to the outer – the ability to make languages, technologies, structures, forms, those expressions of inward originality, and the need to reach out from that inwardness. What revolutions or rebellions will rise when the public becomes cyber-literate?

The digital transformation is another form of the creation of private and public spheres. We sometimes see this vehemently debated in terms of division, insoluble conflict: screen and image versus word and page; publicity versus privacy. I see these energies and creations as complementary, in the way that physicists would use that word: twin aspects of the same historical human impulse and pulse, the soul’s progress toward the fulfillments of consciousness. Multiple literacies suggest the spreading and evolution of personal sensibility, singular intelligence. The unfolding cosmos does have a destiny, and it is mind.