I could, at the drop of the merest invitation to pontificate, gush about the wonder of books. It is a wonder not much talked about anymore, buried as we are under the hype for new "learning systems" and swayed by the fond idea that the computer will somehow increase one's literacy because it uses the alphabet on its keyboard. Yet it is a wonder worth bruiting about, not only because of the pleasant glow of nostalgia it causes, but also because it has a solid political utility to it.
Dylan Thomas said that "my education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out." How often would you hear any such sentiment from the graduates of our public schools, and, for that matter, from our best private schools? Reading in school is a chore. I know -- I've assigned enough reading to enough choruses of groans to know that the thought of picking up a book and diligently paying attention to it is, to many, Sisyphus-work. This summer, on their information cards, I had my students list their favorite books and authors, as well as how often they read. The composite list was weighted heavily toward Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., John Knowles, John Irving, J.D. Salinger, Robert Ludlum, Stephen King. A few students, a minority, read what we might consider "good" literature: Dickens, Shakespeare, the Bible. The reading habits were even more interesting. While some stated that they read all the time, most said that they might read a book every two months or five books a year. Some were diligent newspaper and magazine readers, but yet others, if they read magazines, limited themselves to Time or Newsweek or Sports Illustrated or Reader's Digest. My students are reading on their own, to be sure, but not particularly intellectual fare and not with any attitude approaching voraciousness. When they talk about "hanging out," they are not talking about their eyes.
Perhaps it is a bit naive on my part to expect them to be better than they are. After all, they lack much of what makes reading both enjoyable and necessary to the human spirit. For them, books are not a primary way to get information. There are less demanding teachers willing to dilute complexities down to platitudes, and media dependent not upon the word but upon a wash of images, sound, and vacuous stereotypes to slip its message (massage?) across. Add this to a culture whose primary requisites are acquisition, anxiety, turbulent uprootedness, and the featherbedding of the self, and we are far away from the yankee desire for plain living and high learning and closer to some mixture of Tantalus, Circe, and Mae West.
Reading well takes time, and self-discipline, and a certain kind of farmer's appreciation for the heft and texture of solid things. Henry Ward Beecher, hopefully not speaking of a bygone era, said, "Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?" You either do or do not know what he means. When I go to Boston I love to go to the Brattle Book Shop. I rarely buy anything; I simply like the feel of being surrounded by books. There is a tactile excitement in wandering up and down the aisles, watching a thousand varieties of script reach out to me, smelling the sweet staleness of a book one or two hundred years old.
This kind of sensual and intellectual experience has been pretty much killed off for my students. The school system deadens the excitement of books by forcing people to read in the most unnatural ways. And since books do not have flashing lights or a place to carve your initials when you've nuked five thousand alien ships, they strike the adolescent as static and dull-witted. Most of all, a voraciousness for books and for the ideas in them, and the demand for time to read and digest, comprises a simplicity anathema to our culture's message. If one reads and gets one's pleasure from the unadorned engagement with the printed page, then there is little else one needs. As Erasmus pointed out in the sixteenth century, "When I get a little money, I buy books; and if any is left, I buy food and clothes." A person who believes that books and reading is more essential to life than material necessities is dangerous because that person will not consume the coin of the realm for consumption's sake. Instead, he or she asks for the integrity of the mind, and is thus placed by definition in opposition.
Perhaps, then, that is why my adolescents, and the greater portion of American society, are such horrible readers. The schools and the society at large have worked to induce a conformity of attitude and action; reading, contrary to the piety of the President and his commission, would only negate this scheme by allowing people to think for themselves. Despite what the state says to the contrary, the state benefits if most of its members cannot read.
Reading as radicalism? Indeed. It has always been thought to be such, a way to connect minds and actions in order to nullify the existential barriers of space and time. But our culture has gelded that notion rather cleanly. Today one does not read to link up with ideas and writers of the past; it is not an historical activity. It is instead self-massage, a search for thin buns and washboard stomachs and fictional characters who reflect our modern love of avoidance and safety. Books today are sold as opiates, unregulated by any FDA of the mind. G. K. Chesterton once remarked that there is a great difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read. We are, it seems, becoming very, very tired.