Why the Internet will never replace book reading

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to opinion essay by Times columnist Timothy Egan, “The Comeback of the century,” May 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/opinion/michelle-obama-becoming.html#commentsContainer:

Books are not interactive or immediate. They incorporate noise into the said, dissonant experience into sense.  Not objects of use but tangible things in space, they require time to grasp.  They are not easily discarded.  Novels and poems are not read for a purpose; their meaning is not use.  They may instruct and improve, but one reads for enjoyment.  We read literature to cope with experience through sense-making, with effects that are indeterminate.  

Images in themselves are immediate, but language, like music (and cinema), takes time, as it unfolds and develops.  Online reading does not destroy literature, but tends to weaken its hold on us just as a monitor is before us, ready-to-hand, while a movie screen, with dimensions exceeding gaze and grasp, immerses you in a world.  

Like classical music, the novel facilitates the reflective interiority of an experience that exceeds us.  Images tend to lend themselves to reflection mainly through criticism, and otherwise are "a thought that forms" and not "a form that thinks" (Godard).  The task of reflection cannot be reduced to managerial therapies.  The burden of making it possible was sustained in the last century by psychoanalysis, often in tandem with the arts.  Storytelling can no more die than the sense-making of painful experience in time.  Preserving forms from the past can enable radical liberation from the sterility of an eternal present.  Literature will not help you manage your life, but it may change you as it helps you understand it.