Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and her acceptance speech is really quite good; especially for me, arriving as it does so close on the heels of reading The Cult of the Amateur. In her speech, Lessing specifically laments the fact that people in Zimbabwe are starved for knowledge and literally begging for books while people in more privileged countries have shunned reading for the inanities of the Internet.

A few of my favorite parts:

“We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers.”

“We are a jaded lot, we in our world – our threatened world. We are good for irony and even cynicism. Some words and ideas we hardly use, so worn out have they become. But we may want to restore some words that have lost their potency.”

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