IN THE PAST HALF CENTURY, electronic media and a trend away from speech and recitation in the teaching of literature have resulted in student writers and readers who are too little aware of the sound of good writing. Years ago, much of culture was connected to the spoken word—by recitation at school, programs at oratorical societies, amateur theatricals, and reading aloud at home—but today all that has largely been lost. The writer’s task involves restoring the physicality of words to give them life.

Born into the aristocracy of an agrarian society based on slavery, Tolstoy recognized the need for change and strove to inspire human improvement. His impact on Gandhi and, by extension, Martin Luther King continues to influence lives. Across approximately the same time period, and on the continuum leading from Cyrus McCormick’s harvester to Henry Ford’s assembly line to Mark Zuckerburg’s Facebook and to the ongoing confluence of technological and business innovation, potentially everything—all human interaction and life itself—has been sourced for commodification. Virtual reality is shaping reality. But which is which?

In physics “virtual” connotes a short lifetime. In the tech business, disruption of existing systems and accerlerating cycles of obsolence drive success. But literature aspires to permanence. Whereas tech and market forces develop toward inhuman autonomy (mechanical progression), art exists by embodying human truths. Art inverts scalability. A work of art achieves universality by virtue of its singularity.

Born into the aristocracy of an agrarian society based on slavery, Tolstoy recognized the need for change and strove to inspire human improvement. His impact on Gandhi and, by extension, Martin Luther King continues to influence lives. Across approximately the same time period, and on the continuum leading from Cyrus McCormick’s harvester to Henry Ford’s assembly line to Mark Zuckerburg’s Facebook and to the ongoing confluence of technological and business innovation, potentially everything—all human interaction and life itself—has been sourced for commodification. Virtual reality is shaping reality. But which is which?

In physics “virtual” connotes a short lifetime. In the tech business, disruption of existing systems and accerlerating cycles of obsolence drive success. But literature aspires to permanence. Whereas tech and market forces develop toward inhuman autonomy (mechanical progression), art exists by embodying human truths. Art inverts scalability. A work of art achieves universality by virtue of its singularity.