Tim Page: How I Rebuilt My Brain With Music After A Brain Injury

“When I was still very sick – confused and frightened, with no sure prognosis and the possibility of another seizure looming – I determined to try to rebuild my thought processes with music. And so I spent much of every day listening to complicated pieces which were already familiar but not too familiar – Bach cantatas, Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations,” Wagner operas and long symphonies by Bruckner and Mahler.”

A Ringing Defense Of The Printed Page

As for my attempts to express the impact of the screen on the page, on the actual pages of literary novels, I now understand that these were altogether irrelevant to the requirement of the age that everything be easier, faster, and slicker in order to compel the attention of screen viewers. It strikes me that we’re now suffering collectively from a “tyranny of the virtual,” since we find ourselves unable to look away from the screens that mediate not just print but, increasingly, reality itself.