The plight of bookish folk

“We have been there in the books and out of the books—and where we go, if we are any good, there you can go as we have been.  A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the people all die and none of them were of any importance permanently, except those who practised the arts, and these now wish to cease their work because it is too lonely, too hard to do, and is not fashionable.  People do not want to do it any more because they will be out of fashion and the lice who crawl on literature will not praise them.  Also it is very hard to do.  So what?” – Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa