Dylan Thomas once said that "My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out." How many of the graduates of our public schools and, for that matter, from our best private schools would say that they had this kind of freedom to read, and got this kind of excitement? Not many. Reading in schools is a chore, and people carry that attitude along with them when they take off their graduation gowns and head out for the world.
This is disastrous not only because it wastes minds but also because it makes people politically passive. Reading is one of the most radical things we can do with our lives. But a certain kind of sensual and intellectual experience has been pretty much killed off for a lot of people by our school system and corporations, who don't mind diluting complexities to platitudes to reinforce our culture's message of acquisition and anxiety, uprootedness and self-centering.
But a voraciousness for books and for the ideas in them, and the demand for time to read and digest, is a counter-friction to this message. Reading well takes time and self-discipline, and if one reads and gets 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 are more essential to life than material necessities is dangerous: that person will not consume the coin of the realm for consumption's sake. Instead, he or she will ask only for the integrity of the mind, and thus place the mind in opposition to what is.
Reading as radicalism? Indeed. 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 an 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 tired.
Radio Commentaries: Table of Contents
Spirits In The Material World