Culture and sorcery …

… Touchstone Archives: Post Mortem. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… there is a good reason to take note of them. Postmodern cultural history is a fashionable genre of writing, and you pay a price if you choose to tune out what is currently being said and thought. Oddly enough, it is readers, rather than abstainers, who are better armed against writing fads. Readers know what's on offer and get a chance to think about it. Abstainers absorb it second-hand, without thinking, and often without limit. Just the other day I heard a man mention his friend's misfortune in opening a bottled water business "just when plastic bottles became bad." It awoke in me a vision of those plastic bottles, clear, clean, and functional, jiggling in never-ending line down some conveyer belt to be filled with wholesome spring water . . . when, all at once, they turned bad.