Laudator Temporis Acti

Gustaf Sobin (1935-2005), Ladder of Shadows: Reflecting on Medieval Vestige in Provence and Languedoc (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 96-97:

One wonders, living in a time such as ours, whether a similar period couldn't recur. Whether, indeed, in its own surreptitious way, it hasn't already begun. Of course, our own Dark Age, were it to develop, would be luminous: luminous with neon, cathode ray, with the green screens of countless monitors functioning autonomously in some postlinguistic semiotics, determining every aspect of our lives, shaping not only our decisions but our very choices. Yes, a dark, an incandescent dark, that would have no further need of those very creatures—ourselves—who'd first wired its circuits and set its screens aglow. Haven't we already entered that age, that shadow, the edge of that terrestrial eclipse? Aren't there signs sufficient enough: not the least of them, the steady, ineluctable breakdown in literacy as we move, today, from the verbal to the visual. From an articulated culture to one electronically programmed. From a consciousness rooted in speech to one in which so many neurons react spontaneously to so much optical stimuli. To life, in short, as video game.