Summary of The Owl Has Flown

In Sven Birkerts "The Owl Has Flown", Sven suggests that knowledge, wisdom, happiness and compassion are all correlated. "When everything is happening everywhere, it gets harder to care about anything." He shows this by focusing on the "villager" aspect of knowing everything about a few things or vertical awareness, and the "urbanite" who knows a little about a wide variety of things or horizontal awareness.
Although not directly addressed, it seems as though Birkerts is a bit disgusted by how in our culture we don't go in depth in any learning anymore. We prefer to skim the surface, whereas Sven implies vertical awareness is superior to horizontal awareness. He seems to be somewhat torn though, in which direction to go. Obviously in his ideal world, people would have a wide and in depth variety of knowledge, but this is not on the whole possible. It is interesting seeing the internal battle that he seems to be having on where to draw the line on the subject of knowledge.