Lingua fracta

Daylight is already waning by early July, and so it was that on a recent night when the stars were out, the conversation turned to the subject -- typically breezy for this crowd -- of death's final mystery. I was trying to say something about the bright edges of existence being defined by the certainty of their end, and so I reached for a finer mind to articulate the point. "Well," I mumbled, " 'the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.' "

I wasn't showing off (not in this company, all of whom could quote circles around me). I love the monosyllabic trip of the tongue that Dylan Thomas's famous death poem inspires; more germane, every schoolchild of my generation -- the baby boomers -- had been exposed to the poem by early high school. As with Yeats's rough beast or Dickinson's thing with feathers, Thomas's green fuse, for the melancholy postwar crowd, had been a shortcut for gaining purchase on the cliff face of life. Shakespeare and John Lennon were the sources we quoted instead of Scripture, and their words translated the feelings of mere mortals into universal song.

Or was it really universal? Maybe time and hindsight have glazed my perspective; the Thomas quote holds as a code for the life-death conundrum only if you were listening in class that week, and dared to remember it. But the evening I invoked his words, there were several nods of recognition -- albeit from a certain age group. They ranged from a couple of computer geeks to a woodworker and an academic, and all of them were over 45. The youthful end of the party, brilliant every one and looking baffled, decided to go for a walk.

This could be a simple matter of the referents changing with the generation; my mother and dad hummed Benny Goodman to each other and rolled their eyes when my sister and I, barely adolescent, swooned over the choice between Paul and John. And everyone beneath my slightly arbitrary cutoff point might be bonding on an equally deep plane with lyrics from Fall Out Boy. But the explosion of popular and high culture in the past 15 years has rendered obsolete the assumptions and metaphors of the old guard. If once we could count on the shared experience of a common vocabulary, learned methodically from literary sources that had stood the test of time, now we have to make room on the digital shelves for 10,000 alternatives -- words and images from a zeitgeist that seems to change by the week.

Ah, God, all reactionaries must start off as romantics; I may sound a bit like the British imperialists mourning their diminishing sun while Gandhi gathered steam. But it's not the changing of the guard that seems unsettling these days; it's that the guard is wandering off in a million directions. By any trustworthy historical measure, it's way too soon to know what that desultory revolution will cost us. If we can no longer count on the communal experience of cultural coordinates, what does that say about our ability to communicate with one another -- to find one another on a shared map of consciousness? A century and a half ago, readers turned to newsstand periodicals for the latest installment from Anthony Trollope or George Eliot; in 1946, a mere 60 years ago, the edition of The New Yorker that carried John Hersey's "Hiroshima" in full -- no cartoons in that issue -- sold out on the street within a few hours. Establishing the cultural dialogue even as it articulated it, The New Yorker remained a seminal publication for the next few decades, giving us Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" and Jonathan Schell's "The Fate of the Earth" and other prose pieces that actually had an effect upon the planet.

So, we might argue, has Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," thereby confirming the notion that we've gone from a textual culture to a visual one. Large and small studies regularly confirm this phenomenon: The size of the average vocabulary has plummeted; despite "Harry Potter," kids are reading less, not more; only 16 percent of people under 30 read a daily newspaper. When I taught a literature course at a state university 25 years ago, a few students complained that they had already read two of the selections on the reading list. Two decades later, I gave a guest lecture on critical writing and the New Journalism at another state university, 2,000 miles away; the students were bright and engaged, and easily a third of them planned on going into Web design. I asked how many had heard of the writers Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer. About half the hands went up. How many students had actually read any of them? Two or three.

We're in the midst of a cultural and technological paradigm shift akin to the Industrial Revolution, a fundamental change articulated passionately by Sven Birkerts a decade ago in "The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age." The scribes and the priests no longer hold the keys to the holy word; the word itself has splintered into an infinite series of possibilities. The few minds of any generation who are capable of a line like "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower" will ignore this revolution, or at least create in spite of it, in the same way that Thomas ignored modernism and that Yeats's talent was larger than all the influences upon him. But we cannot know yet -- and it will be immensely complex to comprehend -- what permanent sea change has occurred by trading in the diktats of a cultural canon for a more democratic onslaught of creative effort.

The individual human mind can retain only so much; for every classical or trashy reference that helps me or the guy next door stumble through the ordinary foibles of life, there are a hundred correlatives each of us will never know. What seems essential is the grammar that holds and delivers the cultural dialogue -- the old truth-and-beauty path that Plato argued was the way to the sublime. There's a well-quoted axiom that the purpose of a degree in humanities is to allow its beneficiary the ability to sit in a room alone. That wonderful definition -- containing the gifts of literature and art and critical thought -- is now as obsolete as 300-baud modems. And within a few years and another few dozen zeitgeists, no one will even remember those.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.