Aging & Wisdom Quote by George Steiner

Steiner’s line lands like a cultured obituary that knows it’s also writing its own epitaph. “Almost” is doing the sly work: it’s not apocalypse-mongering, it’s the critic’s more unnerving claim that the end has already started, quietly, with no single villain to blame. The phrase “age of the book” doesn’t mean books will vanish; it means the book as the central technology of serious attention, the default vessel for prestige, argument, and memory. Steiner is mourning a regime, not an object.

The intent is diagnostic as much as elegiac. As a critic steeped in the long European tradition of close reading, translation, and “high” literacy, Steiner is pointing to a cultural reordering: screens displacing pages, speed displacing rereading, the snippet displacing the sustained encounter. The subtext is sharper: when the book stops being the main training ground for thought, societies lose a particular kind of interiority - the ability to sit with difficulty without immediate payoff. That loss isn’t morally “bad” in a Hallmark sense; it’s consequential. It changes what gets rewarded: charisma over coherence, visibility over depth, constant commentary over slow formation.

Context matters. Steiner wrote across a century shaped by totalitarian propaganda, mass media, and then digital acceleration. For him, the book wasn’t quaint; it was a bulwark against the flattening pressures of spectacle and conformity. So the line doubles as a warning to institutions that once treated reading as civic infrastructure. The anxiety isn’t nostalgia for paper. It’s fear that we’re trading a culture of argument for a culture of signal.