There is a phenomenon which I call the Educated Barbarian. This is someone who could have been in school or university for many years, could have won prizes by the score, and at the end has read nothing, knows no history, and above all is totally incurious. Quite a large number of my young friends are like this. They're all utterly delightful. We have a wonderful time together. We gossip, we go shopping. We chat about our friends, but at the slightest mention of anything literary their eyes glaze over. Looking back at my misspent youth, I can remember people who were not particularly literary. They were not even very educated, but they would take for granted that they should have read War and Peace. They did not say, "Oh this is so difficult. Oh this is too long and I don't understand the long words." They just read it. That's what people were like then.

It is my belief that we value narrative because the pattern is in our brain. Our brains are patterned for story telling, for the consecutive. I'm sure if it. I mean, there is nowhere else this pattern could be but in our brains: it doesn't come from outer space. The pattern is being broken up all the time, which means the substance of our brains is being attacked by the kind of books that we're now used to, all in little bits, or the kind of programs we're now used to, or some of the films that we now see, which are so fast that sometimes I find it hard to keep up. None of the young people do. The other night I saw a very gray, very slow, very beautiful film. A young person in the room was saying "cut, cut, cut, cut, cut." He couldn't stand it. He's used to "flick, flick, flick, flick, flick." I'm used to the long, slow narrative and a look on someone's face that tells you about a life and the slow way two people cross a room so you can see what they are like from how they move, and so on. There are two completely different sensibilities here.

Now this inconsequentiality, which we are educating our children to, teaches them they have nothing to do with what's going on. If there's a narrative, you are a part of it. If it is little bits of plot all broken up, then the person does not connect with it, and I wonder if this leads to remarks like that of a young man who murdered someone and said, "Oh well, I didn't realize it would hurt him."

the brains of people in a place like Zimbabwe, who have probably never seen a fax or word processor or computer or any of the stuff that we take for granted, might be in better shape than [those of] our kids because they have not been assaulted all the time. They are of course going to catch up with us, but probably not as efficiently because they have governments which steal everything that comes their way. It might in fact save them. This is a fairly cynical remark, but it's a funny thing that I can have a conversation with a young teacher in the bush who is trying to teach without proper textbooks, without an atlas, without anything, who loves books as the people in this room do, who yearns for them, and who sees books as a source of life, but I couldn't have this conversation with my highly-educated young friends in Britain, who are not interested. They are not interested in ideas. They're not interested in anything in books. I'm merely describing something. I have no solution for it. As I said before, I think probably many of you are familiar with a lot of what I have said.