Note: This article appeared in the New York Times, and was written by Andrew Solomon. Although I don't publish many newspaper articles on this website, I'm including this one.
A survey released on Thursday reports that reading for
pleasure is way down in America among every group - old and
young, wealthy and poor, educated and uneducated, men and
women, Hispanic, black and white. The survey, by the
National Endowment for the Arts, also indicates that people
who read for pleasure are many times more likely than those
who don't to visit museums and attend musical performances,
almost three times as likely to perform volunteer and
charity work, and almost twice as likely to attend sporting
events. Readers, in other words, are active, while
nonreaders - more than half the population - have settled
into apathy. There is a basic social divide between those
for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and
knowledge, and those for whom maturity is a process of
mental atrophy. The shift toward the latter category is
frightening.
Reading is not an active expression like writing, but it is
not a passive experience either. It requires effort,
concentration, attention. In exchange, it offers the
stimulus to and the fruit of thought and feeling. Kafka
said, "A book must be an ice ax to break the seas frozen
inside our soul." The metaphoric quality of writing - the
fact that so much can be expressed through the
rearrangement of 26 shapes on a piece of paper - is as
exciting as the idea of a complete genetic code made up of
four bases: man's work on a par with nature's. Discerning
the patterns of those arrangements is the essence of
civilization.
The electronic media, on the other hand, tend to be torpid.
Despite the existence of good television, fine writing on
the Internet, and video games that test logic, the
electronic media by and large invite inert reception. One
selects channels, but then the information comes out
preprocessed. Most people use television as a means of
turning their minds off, not on. Many readers watch
television without peril; but for those for whom television
replaces reading, the consequences are far-reaching.
My last book was about depression, and the question I am
most frequently asked is why depression is on the rise. I
talk about the loneliness that comes of spending the day
with a TV or a computer or video screen. Conversely,
literary reading is an entry into dialogue; a book can be a
friend, talking not at you, but to you. That the rates of
depression should be going up as the rates of reading are
going down is no happenstance. Meanwhile, there is some
persuasive evidence that escalating levels of Alzheimer's
disease reflect a lack of active engagement of adult minds.
While the disease appears to be determined in large part by
heredity and environmental stimulants, it seems that those
who continue learning may be less likely to develop
Alzheimer's.
So the crisis in reading is a crisis in national health.
I will never forget seeing, as a high school student on my
first trip to East Berlin, the plaza where Hitler and
Goebbels had burned books from the university library.
Those bonfires were predicated on the idea that texts could
undermine armies. Soviet repression of literature followed
the same principle.
The Nazis were right in believing that one of the most
powerful weapons in a war of ideas is books. And for better
or worse, the United States is now in such a war. Without
books, we cannot succeed in our current struggle against
absolutism and terrorism. The retreat from civic to virtual
life is a retreat from engaged democracy, from the
principles that we say we want to share with the rest of
the world. You are what you read. If you read nothing, then
your mind withers, and your ideals lose their vitality and
sway.
So the crisis in reading is a crisis in national politics.
It is important to acknowledge that the falling-off of
reading has to do not only with the incursion of
anti-intellectualism, but also with a flawed
intellectualism. The ascendancy of poststructuralism in the
1980's coincided with the beginning of the catastrophic
downturn in reading; deconstructionism's suggestion that
all text is equal in its meanings and the denigration of
the canon led to the devaluation of literature. The role of
literature is to illuminate, to strengthen, to explain why
some aspect of life is moving or beautiful or terrible or
sad or important or insignificant for people who might
otherwise not understand so much or so well. Reading is
experience, but it also enriches other experience.
Even more immediate than the crises in health and politics
brought on by the decline of reading is the crisis in
national education. We have one of the most literate
societies in history. What is the point of having a
population that can read, but doesn't? We need to teach
people not only how, but also why to read. The struggle is
not to make people read more, but to make them want to read
more.
While there is much work do be done in the public schools,
society at large also has a job. We need to make reading,
which is in its essence a solitary endeavor, a social one
as well, to encourage that great thrill of finding kinship
in shared experiences of books. We must weave reading back
into the very fabric of the culture, and make it a mainstay
of community.
Reading is harder than watching television or playing video
games. I think of the Epicurean mandate to exchange easier
for more difficult pleasures, predicated on the
understanding that those more difficult pleasures are more
rewarding. I think of Walter Pater's declaration: "The
service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the
human spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of sharp
and eager observation. . . . The poetic passion, the desire
of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most; for
art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the
highest quality to your moments as they pass." Surely that
is something all Americans would want, if we only
understood how readily we might achieve it, how well worth
the effort it is.
© Andrew Solomon. This article appeared on July 10, 2004,
on the Op-Ed page of
The New York Times .
Andrew Solomon is the author of "The Noonday Demon: An
Atlas of Depression."
~
Any comments mail to me at (LaraOct7@aol.com)
~
© July
2004
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