Reason for despair

H/T Ann Althouse, I learn that Amazon keeps track of the sentences most often highlighted by Kindle users. You can see the list here. It's a pretty sad list with the masters of trite self-improvement advice such as Suzanne Collins, David Platt and Malcolm Gladwell dominating. Sadly, both Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde make the list too and the quotes selected suggest that for the most part they too are treated as dispensers of wisdom rather than s the masters of irony they actually were. Apparently there is something of an appetite for empty platitudes and painfully obvious moral advice.

But the real heartbreaker is seeing Jane Austen at number three. Why is that a cause for despair? Because this is the third most highlighted sentence by Kindle users:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Yup. I mean it's not just that it is the most famous sentence in the book and everyone already knows it,  it's also the first %^&*ing sentence in the book!  Why would anyone highlight the first sentence of a book? Are they worried they won't be able to find it again?

The real reason it gets highlighted, I suspect, is precisely that everyone does know it and lots of people highlight it just to pat themselves on the back for spotting it, the same way they applaud a song when they recognize it at a concert.

Austen makes the list againat number five with this:

Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

Again, I suspect the reason is recognition. "Hey, the book is called Pride and Prejudice and here as sentence talking about pride, so this may be what it's all about." The problem is that that line is spoken by Mary who is given to spouting obvious platitudes. Austen is making fun of contemporary moralists here and not making any deep observation about pride. This is the sort of remark that might have been made by the Suzanne Colinnses of Austen's day. 

The stupidest quote of the lot, and this is quite an honour in this field, belongs to Abraham Verghese in a book I won't be reading called Cutting for Stone and it reads:

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

Words fail me ... something I have in common with Abraham Verghese.

I had to read all the way to number ninety before I found a genuinely profound observation highlighted. It's one of several fro The Picture of Dorian Gray:

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

That's really good. As I was saying in the comments someone else's blog recently, it's very easy to list the things necessary for contrition but something else altogether to determine what would be sufficient for contrition.

UPDATE: There is a real treasure at number 121. This is from Jane Eyre:

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

What's remarkable about that? It was written by a Brontë! Having a Brontë telling us not to spend our life nursing animosity or registering wrongs is like having Hitler tell us not to be anti-Semitic.