"... in fact any good mind properly taught can think like Euclid and like Walt Whitman. The Renaissance, as we saw, was full of such minds, equally c… - Jacques Barzun

Many of us affect a tone of irony about gadgets, as if we lived always in realms above and dealt with trifles only during rare descents from sublime thoughts. The truth is that more and more of the important things in life turn on pinpoints. Our frustrations begin in trivialities — a telephone out of order, a car that will not start, a claim check whose number has been misread. The thing in cellophane that cannot be got at — plain to the sight but sealed like an egg — is the modern version of the torture of Tantalus. Catastrophes we will deal with like heroes, but the bottle top that defies us saps our morale, like the tiny arrows of the Lilliputians that maddened Gulliver and set his strength at naught.

Being law-abiding means filing a paper on time, not parking near a hydrant, and getting a zoning variance before moving a fence on one's own property. A world continually tighter in these ways intensifies the search for loopholes, tempts the unscrupulous to invent them, hardens the cynic, and keeps alive the urge to break loose. Such pulses of thought and feeling are bound to take away the ease and pleasure of ethical conduct. Habitual morality is baffled by the stop-and-go, and people's disregard of injunctions causes no surprise; it seems rather to show firmness of mind.

The need for a body of common knowledge and common reference does not disappear when a society is pluralistic. On the contrary, it grows more necessary, so that people of different origins and occupation may quickly find familiar ground and as we say, speak a common language. It not only saves time and embarrassment, but it also ensures a kind of mutual confidence and goodwill. One is not addressing an alien, as blank as a stone wall, but a responsive creature whose mind is filled with the same images, memories, and vocabulary as oneself. Otherwise, with the unstoppable march of specialization, the individual mind is doomed to solitude and the individual heart to drying up.