## Highlights Fiction’s abyss is silence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is Total Noise, the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total freedom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgppazmxvkjd3zcrfvsec58p)) --- It may possibly be that acuity and taste in choosing which Deciders one submits to is now the real measure of informed adulthood. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpq21n1jga53gsmx70nc6qw)) --- It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this—about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.’ ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpqmhwptenya03ksant2c97)) --- ...what free, informed adulthood might look like in the context of Total Noise: not just the intelligence to discern one’s own error or stupidity, but the humility to address it, absorb it, and move on and out there from, bravely, toward the next revealed error. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpqtn015sd7qge0g6e5x99p)) --- Part of our emergency is that it’s so tempting to do this sort of thing now, to retreat to narrow arrogance, pre-formed positions, rigid filters, the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature. The alternative is dealing with massive, high-entropy amounts of info and ambiguity and conflict and flux; it’s continually discovering new areas of personal ignorance and delusion. In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jgpqr0gmsc95gfycs4k76646)) ---