'By Other, Less Difficult, Media'

Prophecy is best left to the prophets. Writers are not a notably prescient bunch. Too often, like the rest of us, they see only what they hope for, not what the future holds. Consider the catastrophe-mongering of the late Paul Ehrlich. And yet, while hardly trying, a writer will sometimes stumble onto a keyhole into the future. Seventy years ago, Louis MacNeice wrote “To Posterity” (Visitations, 1957): “When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards And reading and even speaking have been replaced By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste They held for us for whom they were framed in words, And will your grass be green, your sky be blue, Or will your birds be always wingless birds?” It reads like an elegy for poetry and literary culture. “Books in graveyards” recalls Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” with its “storied urn.” Traditionally, a book carved into a gravestone signified the Book of…