IN MY CRAFT OR SULLEN ART

The last nearly 20 years has made solitude — real solitude — a much harder commodity to come by. We have these gadgets which are designed to address that same anxiety of being alone but, in my opinion, don’t actually assuage it; they just distract you from it. There’s some part of me, if I spend all day online, that is even lonelier than when I started. Now I’ve got this kind of gnawing hunger. I want to hit the button again. … That kind of lever pressing is much more akin to a drug, to some sort of compulsive behavior, than it is to the experience I have when reading Tolstoy. I think writers, because they need solitude, are preserving some rather endangered concept in the very technological world we live in. And it is our job to create books that are compelling enough to pull a reader out of that crazy beeping world and into a quiet place to have a real experience for 20 hours. And if enough of us can keep doing that, we’ll keep the thing going.

—Jonathan Franzen