Feeling the need for a little moral sustenance, I went on a trawl for Zygmunt Bauman. In a short essay of his “Does Reading Have a Future?” I found this lovely quote from Milan Kundera:
“The art inspired by God’s laughter does not by nature serve ideological certitudes, it contradicts them,” Kundera notes in The Art of the Novel. “Like Penelope, it undoes each night the tapestry that the theologians, philosophers, and learned men have woven the day before.”
Bauman continues:
“Artistic fiction defends hard-won human freedom and redeems human imagination and daring; in a world waging a war of attrition against contingency, ambivalence and mystery, the novel is a perpetual training in the difficult but badly needed art of living under conditions of uncertainty, in the company of polyvalence and among a variety of life forms.”
And concludes his essay with the sombre warning:
“When we worry about the future of books and book readership, let us take a closer look at society and its trends. To make books fit for the society we inhabit, let us try to prevent it from becoming unfit for books.”