The Closing of the American Book

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/10/opinion/10SOLO.html?th

 

July 10, 2004

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

The Closing of the American Book

By ANDREW SOLOMON

 

A survey released on Thursday reports that reading

for pleasure is way down in America among every group

— old and young, wealthy and poor, educated and

uneducated, men and women, Hispanic, black and white.

The survey, by the National Endowment for the Arts,

also indicates that people who read for pleasure are

many times more likely than those who don't to visit

museums and attend musical performances, almost three

times as likely to perform volunteer and charity work,

and almost twice as likely to attend sporting events.

Readers, in other words, are active, while nonreaders

— more than half the population — have settled into

apathy. There is a basic social divide between those

for whom life is an accrual of fresh experience and

knowledge, and those for whom maturity is a process of

mental atrophy. The shift toward the latter category

is frightening.

 

Reading is not an active expression like writing, but

it is not a passive experience either. It requires

effort, concentration, attention. In exchange, it

offers the stimulus to and the fruit of thought and

feeling. Kafka said, " A book must be an ice ax to

break the seas frozen inside our soul. " The metaphoric

quality of writing — the fact that so much can be

expressed through the rearrangement of 26 shapes on a

piece of paper — is as exciting as the idea of a

complete genetic code made up of four bases: man's

work on a par with nature's. Discerning the patterns

of those arrangements is the essence of civilization.

 

The electronic media, on the other hand, tend to be

torpid. Despite the existence of good television, fine

writing on the Internet, and video games that test

logic, the electronic media by and large invite inert

reception. One selects channels, but then the

information comes out preprocessed. Most people use

television as a means of turning their minds off, not

on. Many readers watch television without peril; but

for those for whom television replaces reading, the

consequences are far-reaching.

 

My last book was about depression, and the question I

am most frequently asked is why depression is on the

rise. I talk about the loneliness that comes of

spending the day with a TV or a computer or video

screen. Conversely, literary reading is an entry into

dialogue; a book can be a friend, talking not at you,

but to you. That the rates of depression should be

going up as the rates of reading are going down is no

happenstance. Meanwhile, there is some persuasive

evidence that escalating levels of Alzheimer's disease

reflect a lack of active engagement of adult minds.

While the disease appears to be determined in large

part by heredity and environmental stimulants, it

seems that those who continue learning may be less

likely to develop Alzheimer's.

 

So the crisis in reading is a crisis in national

health.

 

I will never forget seeing, as a high school student

on my first trip to East Berlin, the plaza where

Hitler and Goebbels had burned books from the

university library. Those bonfires were predicated on

the idea that texts could undermine armies. Soviet

repression of literature followed the same principle.

 

The Nazis were right in believing that one of the most

powerful weapons in a war of ideas is books. And for

better or worse, the United States is now in such a

war. Without books, we cannot succeed in our current

struggle against absolutism and terrorism. The retreat

from civic to virtual life is a retreat from engaged

democracy, from the principles that we say we want to

share with the rest of the world. You are what you

read. If you read nothing, then your mind withers, and

your ideals lose their vitality and sway.

 

So the crisis in reading is a crisis in national

politics.

 

It is important to acknowledge that the falling-off of

reading has to do not only with the incursion of

anti-intellectualism, but also with a flawed

intellectualism. The ascendancy of poststructuralism

in the 1980's coincided with the beginning of the

catastrophic downturn in reading; deconstructionism's

suggestion that all text is equal in its meanings and

the denigration of the canon led to the devaluation of

literature. The role of literature is to illuminate,

to strengthen, to explain why some aspect of life is

moving or beautiful or terrible or sad or important or

insignificant for people who might otherwise not

understand so much or so well. Reading is experience,

but it also enriches other experience.

 

Even more immediate than the crises in health and

politics brought on by the decline of reading is the

crisis in national education. We have one of the most

literate societies in history. What is the point of

having a population that can read, but doesn't? We

need to teach people not only how, but also why to

read. The struggle is not to make people read more,

but to make them want to read more.

 

While there is much work do be done in the public

schools, society at large also has a job. We need to

make reading, which is in its essence a solitary

endeavor, a social one as well, to encourage that

great thrill of finding kinship in shared experiences

of books. We must weave reading back into the very

fabric of the culture, and make it a mainstay of

community.

 

Reading is harder than watching television or playing

video games. I think of the Epicurean mandate to

exchange easier for more difficult pleasures,

predicated on the understanding that those more

difficult pleasures are more rewarding. I think of

Walter Pater's declaration: " The service of

philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human

spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of sharp

and eager observation. . . . The poetic passion, the

desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake,

has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to

give nothing but the highest quality to your moments

as they pass. " Surely that is something all Americans

would want, if we only understood how readily we might

achieve it, how well worth the effort it is.

 

Andrew Solomon is the author of " The Noonday Demon: An

Atlas of Depression. "

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company