Modern Society and the Value of Reading

Modern Society and the Value of Reading

We pack our schedules too full, then constantly complain that we’re too busy. We keep buying things we don’t need, then feel oppressed by the clutter around us. We never sleep well, or never sleep enough. We compare ourselves to the manufactured bodies we see in magazines and the exaggerated lives we see on television. We watch cooking shows while eating fast food. We worry about getting sick and sign up for gym memberships we never use. We have hundreds or even thousands of contacts, yet rarely see our best friends. We bombard ourselves with videos, emails, and text messages. We even interrupt the things we ourselves have already interrupted.

Whenever we need to decide what to buy or how to spend our free time, we always want one more option. In order to choose among so many artificially created possibilities, we have turned the whole world into an endless catalogue for picking and sorting, where anything that doesn’t strike us as eye-opening is dismissed as useless. We no longer praise in public while belittling in private—we openly belittle anything that fails to thrill us. Love and hate have become the default settings: either five stars or one.

For most people, this is essentially a matter of fear—the fear of missing out. No matter where we are, there is always someone, somewhere, doing, watching, eating, or listening to something better.

I long to escape this way of life. I think that if enough of us manage to escape it, the world might become a slightly better place because of it. Connectivity is one of the greatest conveniences of the internet age, and it has made incredible things possible. With a few keystrokes I can access information from around the world. I can buy, sell, trade, and share things online. When I’m driving in an unfamiliar place, a knowledgeable voice tells me where to go and “recalculates my route” when I take a wrong turn. It is almost impossible to count all the ways the internet has changed our lives.

But being connected is one thing; being connected all the time is another. When I want to “go offline” for a few days, or sometimes just a few hours, I warn other people in advance; the implication is that unless you hear otherwise, you may assume I won’t be online during that time. Constant connectivity can become a curse, encouraging the less generous sides of our nature. The nine Muses of the classical world did not include one for restlessness or distraction.

In a world of endless connectivity, books are uniquely suited to help us change our relationship to pace and to the things that fill our daily habits. Because we cannot interrupt a book, the only thing we can interrupt while reading is ourselves. A book is the expression of an individual, or a group of individuals—not of a hive mind or a collective consciousness. A book speaks to us in a considerate, one-to-one conversation. It asks for our attention. It asks us, for a while, to set aside our own beliefs and prejudices and listen to someone else’s beliefs and prejudices. You may loudly complain about a book, scribble all over its margins, or even toss it out the window. But you still cannot change a single word of it.

The technology of the book is a genuinely brilliant technology: whether the words appear on a page or on a screen, their order is fixed, yet the speed of reading is entirely up to you. Of course, that means you can speed up and skim, but it also means you can slow down, savor, and reflect.