This post responds both to Mia's post on seduction and Edna's post on writing.

Mia, responding to Juri's question about pickup artists, constrasts the shallow and somewhat psychologically ugly genre of modern-day pickup artists with the great seducers of yore, e.g. the Vicomte and the Marquise of Dangerous Liaisons. 

Edna, invoking Arendt, raises among other things the question of what it means to put things into words, what it would mean to be in a world where things exist only in the mind, and of the relation of thought and writing.

I propose connecting the two by asking: Is seduction still possible in a world where no one reads novels?

I'd suggest that the novel (and its precursor, the handwritten letter) as a genre where characters' interior worlds were mapped out in great intricacy and without pretense, was responsible for a certain deep intuitive, not to say psychological, awareness among literate people for the last several centuries. And I think this intimate knowledge of the other's reality, the other's inner world (which is usually to say women's) made possible a certain kind of romantic relationship, one of whose manifestations is the kind of "masterful" seduction Mia refers to. The movie version of Dangerous Liaisons is magnificent, but even as a movie it presumes a certain sensibility which comes from words. Some of the most brilliant lines in the movie (the Marquise's description of her art) come from a kind of self-explanation which, although spoken, is almost literary.

Can one read Woolf, can one read Proust without learning to see the interiors of others?

So I would take Mia's contrast of the pickup artists with D.L. much further, and say that the uncomprehending shallowness of the pickup artists comes, in part, from people who live in essentially an entirely visual culture, as contrasted with a literate one. Pickup artists don't read -- meaning they don't read for understanding, they don't read novels. They lust after women they've seen in pictures. Pornography leaves no room for seduction. When all you have is an image, you are forced to supply the thoughts in the other person's head. You are always forced to encouter them from the outside. The word "seduction" had, for a long time, the color of leading astray with respect to beliefs -- it is a word which operates from the inside out.

And this touches also on Edna's question about writing: remember that for a long time women's interior world was not represented in writing, nor indeed was many men's; and to romanticize the purity of thought before language is to miss the precision, and the testimony, which arises when one begins to speak. By writing down one's inner life,  one begins to exist as a person for other people, even if it feels to oneself that something is being lost.

But perhaps this quality of language and of expression has passed its peak. Most things online (this site excepted) reveal nothing of the interior world. All writing is not writing, in that sense, nor does it have that power.