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The Owl Has Flown Analysis

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The Metamorphasis of Wisdom In his article, The Owl Has Flown, author Sven Birkerts suggests that knowledge has lost nearly all of its depth and reading has shifted from vertical to horizontal. The author supports this suggestion by providing the example of Menocchio, a 16th century man who nearly memorized the few books that he owned. He argues that the generations before the 17th century did not have access to the vast number of books that those of the future generations do. This allowed people of the past to take more time to analyze and make inferences about books. With the exponential growth in the number of available books and limited time to read them, Birkerts believes that the newer generations have neglected wisdom altogether. He …show more content…

He was able to gain a plethora of knowledge on his area of expertise as he read more intensively. However, these may have been the only books the person read in their entire life, narrowing their understanding of other topics to a primitive level. Birkerts emphasizes this when he says, “The villager, who knows every scrap of lore about his environs is blessedly unaware of cataclysms in different lands. News of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 took months to travel across Europe” (Birkerts 73). This quote is able to illustrate the lack of outside knowledge encompassed by those of previous generations. Similarly, it shows how slowly news traveled, preventing these citizens from staying current and informed. Though the cliché saying, “Ignorance is bliss” may come to mind, it is not the blissfulness of life that is being argued but rather the wisdom of society. As people stay in their area of expertise for such a long period of time they begin to gain “wisdom.” As described by the author, they learn about human nature in their field as well as the processes of life as they go through them. These lessons, however, can be learned over time regardless of a person’s depth of knowledge in a topic. Time teaches these lessons to people as they experience more interactions. This illustrates that intensive reading in order to gain depth of knowledge does not actually give anyone wisdom, but rather the tools necessary for experience which then creates

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