If all books
were to disappear from the world, think of the impact not on readers, those of
us who live by the book, but on the great mass of humanity who are non- or indifferent
readers. Nothing. No impact at all, thank you. Perhaps even relief. One less
nagging sense of inferiority to carry around. Just as purportedly educated people
approve of knocking down Jefferson and Lincoln statues, so will they acquiesce to
putting the torch to Spinoza and Henry James. Of course, there’s another, less
conspicuous way to destroy books: don’t read them. We’ve reached a place in
history where illiteracy and aliteracy carry a certain cachet, like driving a
Prius.
In “The Wall
and the Books” (trans. Eliot Weinberger, p. 344, Selected Non-Fictions,
1999), Borges reminds us that the Chinese emperor who ordered construction of
the Great Wall, Shih Huang Ti, also ordered the burning of all books written
before his time. Borges refers to the latter decree as “the rigorous abolition
of history.” Among the writers slated for the emperor’s auto-da-fé were Chuang
Tzu, Confucius and Lao Tzu – figures well-known even to readers in the West. With
the loss of knowledge goes something less tangible but comparably essential to
those with the capacity to cherish the beautiful. Borges concludes his essay:
“Music,
states of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and
certain places, all want to tell us something, or have told us something we
shouldn't have lost, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of a
revelation as yet unproduced is, perhaps, the
aesthetic fact.”
I once had hope that the Harry Potter phenomenon would start some younger people on the path to reading other and better things, much as my reading of adolescent books and magazines gave me a hearty appetite for more substantive books and ideas. Alas... There is little more depressing to me than to see what has happened to my local library, where thousands of books were sold for a dollar or two and the stacks shrunk to half their length. Very few read. No one cares. Thank you again for your nearly heroic efforts to promote good reading (and thinking).
ReplyDeleteAfter I retired from a certain small public university, the curriculum was revised. You can get a BA in English from it having taken, for your literature requirement, no more than 5 3-credit courses. If they were all offered in the same semester you could knock off the literature component & still have time left over.
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