The iPad and the decline of the West

The Apple iPad irrupted upon the consciousness of an innocent public this week. A new and improved way to read! Well, I was unimpressed by the advertising fanfare.

The emphasis on the technological medium for conveying literature rather than the artistic content is another example of modern aesthetic decadence, in my admittedly stodgy view. I was reading Havelock Ellis's introduction to J.K.Huysmans's Against the Grain and found a serviceable definition of artistic decadence. (Ellis and Huysmans are two of the most decadent literary fellows you are likely to run across. I would discourage anyone from following their principles, either aesthetic or moral. But they know artistic decadence thoroughly, from the inside out.)

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Havelock Ellis: A decadent style is only such in relation to a classic style. It is simply a further development of a classic style, a further specialization, the homogeneous, in Spencerian phraseology, having become heterogeneous. The first is beautiful because the parts are subordinated to the whole; the second is beautiful because the whole is subordinated to the parts. Among our own early prose-writers Sir Thomas Browne represents the type of decadence in style. Swift's prose is classic, Pater's decadent. Hume and Gibbon are classic, Emerson and Carlyle decadent. In architecture, which is the key to all the arts, we see the distinction between the classic and the decadent visibly demonstrated; Roman architecture is classic, to become in its Byzantine developments completely decadent, and St. Mark's is the perfected type of decadence in art; pure early Gothic, again, is strictly classical in the highest degree because it shows an absolute subordination of detail to the bold harmonies of structure, while later Gothic, grown weary of the commonplaces of structure and predominantly interested in beauty of detail, is again decadent. In each case the earlier and classic manner -- for the classic manner, being more closely related to the ends of utility, must always be earlier -- subordinates the parts to the whole, and strives after those virtues which the whole may best express; the later manner depreciates the importance of the whole for the benefit of its parts, and strives after the virtues of individualism. All art is the rising and falling of the slopes of a rhythmic curve between these two classic and decadent extremes.
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The West is presently skiing down a black diamond slope toward total individualism (in the form of societal atomization -- the Facebook nation) and decadence. Enjoy your iPads and your iLibrary books, my darling little consumers. I myself will abide in the moldering stacks of my branch library until its doors are shuttered.