"TRUE SERIOUSNESS" VERSUS "THE MERE PERFORMANCE OF SERIOUSNESS"

Lee Siegel, Are You Serious?: How to Be and Get Real in the Age of Silly (New York: Harper, 2011) ("We say we want meaning in our lives. . . . And the three essences of that search are: Attention, Purpose, and Continuity, through any circumstance, and in any situation." Id. at 50. "Surrounded by our gadgets, we have also lost the knack for the solitude that serious reading and writing once required. . . . As a result of our dependency on the technology of information and communication, even the most literary among us use language almost exclusively to communicate rather than to capture, analyze, or evoke." "Finally, we are becoming more visual and even musical than we are verbal. We are seriously visual and musical, but few of us any longer are serious readers." Id. at 116. Food for serious thought. Or, is it, food for "serious" thought?).