'One More Way in Which the Earth is Heating Up'

What do people do who don’t read, and by “read” I mean read books? How do they occupy their time? How do they come to understand the past which, as Faulkner reminded us, is never really past? I understand that those who work long hours – say, emergency room nurses – have little time for leisure activities. They go home to sleep or watch a little television before climbing into bed. Look at human history and it’s obvious that serious, self-motivated reading has always been a minority taste, even with the growth of literacy in recent centuries in the West. My concern here is not snobbish. I take nothing away from a person who hasn’t read Proust. Neither have most of the professors I know.

Such questions are hardly original with me. I ask because of a student I met on Monday at the Rice University library. He was at the next terminal, waiting for a key to one of the study rooms upstairs. I had on hold the just-arrived novel by the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade (1910-82), Sons and Daughters, and was checking it out, along with several other books. Grade’s novel is Victorian-sized, almost seven-hundred pages, roughly the length of Bleak House, and the student asked if I planned to read it. “Yes, he’s a great writer,” I said, and he asked how long it would take me. 

We stepped away from the circulation desk and I explained that I couldn’t say with certainty because I usually read several books simultaneously, alternating texts as the spirit moves me. “Probably a couple of weeks,” I said, and he replied that it would take him months. I asked how long since he had read a book not assigned by a prof (he’s a mechanical engineering major). He couldn’t remember and I could see he felt sheepish. I wished him well and we parted.

 

I had recently read an essay, “The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society,” by James Marriott, whose work I don’t otherwise know. “The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution,” he writes, which I wish I had told that student in the library, because “the world” includes mechanical engineering. I won’t rehash Marriott’s reasoning. He blames the obvious suspect, the smartphone and other electronic devices, for the forty-percent plummet in leisure reading in the U.S. in the last twenty years. Marriott writes:

 

“This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.”

 

I understand: people don’t want to listen to a lot of doomsaying. I don’t envy my sons the world they are likely to inherit. In the introduction to Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing, (2009), his biography of Isaac Rosenfeld, Steven J. Zipperstein writes:

 

“Few who write today, few who live amid books that they read so that they might write better, can overlook the assault on reading at the heart of contemporary culture – with its emphasis on the visual, its distrust of intellection, which itself is, arguably, among the more powerful legacies of the last century. Never, it seems, has the role of the writer felt so at odds with what is around us – despite superb writing that seems to speak to fewer and fewer. Other writers have in the past, of course, feared that theirs were times when the fate of literacy was at risk and such concerns have proven unfounded, off-kilter. No matter: now this sense of uncertainty feels warranted. For those, like myself, who early on found coherence in the world around us mostly through books, the uncertainty surrounding their fate today, their increasing marginality, feels ominous, one more way in which the earth is heating up right under our feet.”