After an introductory dialogue with Ranjan Ghosh’s chapter 1, Miller asks: “Does literature matter today?” With this question in mind, the essay, with frequent references to Ghosh’s assertions, tells the story of Miller’s life-long love of literature and puzzlement by it when he shifted in college from majoring in physics to majoring in English at the time of the rapid change to new forms of digital telecommunications. A series of openings of famous literary texts (all but one in English) are then cited and used as the basis for identifying some chief features of that strange thing we call literature. Claims are made, on the basis of Wolfgang Iser’s and Maurice Blanchot’s theories of literature, that literature matters because it serves three essential human functions: social critique, the pleasure of the text, and allowing a materialization of the imaginary or an endless approach to an unapproachable imaginary. Though human civilization would not come to an end if literature, in the old-fashioned sense of printed books, were to vanish in an age of what Miller calls “prestidigitalization,” much would be lost that video games, films, television, and popular songs can hardly replace.