None of this was new. Reading has always been used as a way to divide a country and a culture into the literati and everyone else, the intellectually worthy and the hoi polloi. But in the fifteenth century Gutenberg invented the printing press, and so began the process of turning the book from a work of art for the few into a source of information for the many. After that, it became more difficult for one small group of people to lay an exclusive claim to books, to seize and hold reading as their own. But it continued to be done by critics and scholars. When I began to read their work, I was disheartened to discover that many of them felt that the quality of poetry and prose, novels and history and biography, was plummeting into some intellectual bargain basement. But reading saved me from despair, as it always had, for the more I read the more I realized it had always been thus, and that apparently an essential part of studying literature, whether in 1840, 1930, or 1975, was to conclude that there had once been a golden age, that it was gone. "The movies consumed so large a part of the leisure of the country that little time is left for other things," the trade magazine of the industry, Publisher Weekly, lamented in 1923. "The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor," the French writer Louis-Ferdinand Celine said in 1960.
这些当然并不是新鲜事。人们历来用读书将一个国家或文化分成两部分：文人和其余的黎民百姓，有才智的上等人和其他普通民众。但是当古登堡在15世纪发明了印刷机之后，书本从原来只是少数人享有的艺术品逐渐变成大众的信息来源。从那以后，一小部分人想要独占书本并将读书的乐趣当作自己的特权就变得难多了。不过，批评家和学者们仍然在这么做。读他们的作品时，我失望地发现他们中间有很多人都认为如今诗歌、散文、小说、历史和传记的质量已经严重下降，已经变成知识产品当中的廉价处理品了。但是读书总能将我从绝望中解救出来，因为我看的书越多，就越是认识到事情历来如此。很明显，文学研究，不论其对象是1840年、1930年还是1975年的文学作品，其主要结论就是：曾经有个黄金时代，但是已经一去不返了。1923年，出版界的专业杂志《出版人周刊》曾感慨电影占去了国家那么大一部分休闲时间，几乎没有给别的活动留下时间。”1960年，法国作家路易斯·费迪南德·塞利娜也说：“小说无法与汽车、电影、电视以及烈酒相竞争。”