Hic Jacet Libris

[posted at www.patriot-x.blogspot.com]

I only fake it with Latin. The title is supposed to say "Here Lies Books [Library]". If it doesn't, leave a comment of correction and show off your skills at Latin!

Some days may go by without my picking up a book and reading. Like anyone who works, goes to school, and has hobbies and relationships, I can get very busy. Yet most of my days contain at least 15-20 minutes of uninterrupted time with a book. It is often fiction, but not always. These books are not usually of a technical documentation nature. Instructions are for wimps, and people who don't use uber-intuitive Apple Macintosh products. (Donning asbestos undies for the flame-backs . . . only poking fun at my PC pals!)

I also know quite a long list of very, very intelligent people. And among my brilliant friends and family, very, very few of them read books anymore. Most may have some book in their bathroom that they while away some hours with until, in a year, they may finish one, or even two. But before DVD's, cable TV and the Internet, it was not really uncommon for people to read as many as 100 books in a year. (My father averaged about two books a week, as I recall. As an average, this shows that some weeks he may have skipped reading altogether, or he may have read a book a day.)

I find myself seduced by the time-salve of non-reading. If I have a half hour to "kill" and really feel the need to unplug from my current time-space locality, I very often pop in a DVD of a TV series, or perhaps sit in front of the cable TV (a very rare occurrence, actually), or surf to a website to pick over the day's headlines and submissions. Still, I start and finish about 2 books a month.

This is not to brag. As society and technology evolve, what once was an asset all too easily becomes a liability . . . a strength becomes a weakness, or an admirable quality something laughable, even rude.

But I continue to insist that reading and writing (not sign-recognition skills or penmanship, but the consumption and production of profound literature) are the vitamin-laden veggies of human intellectual diet, and that humanity is developing cultural and philosophical malnutrition.

Reading demands thought. One does not typically say to themselves, "The red light indicates a requirement to stop my vehicle for the safety and convenience of myself and others." They just (hopefully) apply the brakes and wait for the green light. Glancing at a street sign might require someone to ask themselves, "Am I looking for Amhurst Drive or Amhurst Lane?", but that's an issue of memory, not of cognitive, critical reasoning.

It only takes an hour and a half to three hours to experience a book in a cinema or on a DVD. It takes exponentially more time than that to actually read the original work. Why? Either the "technology" of reading is inherently flawed and delivers less data at slower rates . . . or there is more to consume in a book than in a DVD. The best-crafted, richest movie, web-animation, stage play or TV program may transmit sight of moving shapes and forms — dialogue, sound effects, and music — and even on-screen text, for multiple streams of information. As often as not, a viewer only manages to critically assimilate a percentage of all the information offered in such a flood of impressions and data. In a book, every bit of the information conveyed in current, popular media is offered, often with more detail, and always, always with more luxury to go as quickly or as slowly as one likes, often pausing altogether, so that the consumer can meditate on what they are perceiving, measuring their impressions and associating what they jusy encountered with something already taken in. I have stopped and flipped back to confirm something I felt was contradictory to something I read previously, and confirmed the contradiction (and shown up a portion of plot as being evasive?), or corrected my own original percetion. If one uses a digital video recording device (TiVo), or is watching a DVD, they might stop and go back to check on a detail, but as often as not, this takes too long and disrupts the flow of the narrative . . . especially to others watching with the viewer.

Reading is solitary. Now and then someone may read to another person, either as a "Listen to this" excerpt, or to share an entire work with someone (husbands and wives have been know to read to each other at night before sleep, although the practice may have never been common, and, of course, parents once read to children fairly often). But reading is most often something one does alone, even in a room full of people, and such intimacy with the author is challenging, even daunting. One may enter a locked arena chamber to face mortal combat with a sleeping turtle and be bored to distraction . . . or with a very hungry, wild tiger. In the case of reading, a tremendous percentage of the experience is brought by the reader. Some authors are so very good that their books have all the stripes and fangs of a Begal monster . . . but many readers also bring claws and hot, rumbling growls to the conflict.

Healthier foods almost invariably cost more than cheaper edibles. This is not just because of brand inflation for placing the word "Healthy" in the title, or selling the food in a form of exclusivity. The cost to eat well is prohibitive to those on ridiculous, so-called budgets and fixed, or unreliable incomes. Reading is also more "expensive" than other forms of entertainment. It demands time. The modern mantra of "Who has the time?" is a serious consideration. In the time it took to compose this post I easily could have showered and had breakfast, although reading it will certainly take less time than that!

But the cost of reading is also the cost in intellectual flabbiness. Technology makes it far less necessary to be able to sprint for one's life, or walk to work, harvest their own food, etc. There was a time when physical fitness was a daily survival feature, and those days are gone even in most circumstances of the Third World nations. One does not have to be "Tarzan" to survive in most places these days. Technology is similarly eliminating the need for critical thought in order to get by, day to day. Taking the easiest way out in all circumstances produces couch-potatos without the ability to metabolize conflicting information. They go into democratic elections clinging to the ideology easiest for them to pallette, parroting very short excerpts from their favorite commentators. (This is true of most major political and philosophical [and religious] persuasions . . . some people will just naturally find liberalism easier to swallow and digest, and others will choke on it.)

Some vestige of perspective warns me that crying out a Dire Warning about "aliteracy" may, ultimately, be similar to shouting an alarm about the dread evils of those confounded horseless carriages. It is less trite to say that "times change" than I believed it to be when I was younger, and change had yet to stack to such a height as to loom over my head, ready to topple and crush me. Younger people can still see over the tops of the stacks of changes they encounter, and the "new" yet to come is often very desirable. This is only natural! But when the warehouse of mutation blocks sight of the future, and the new cannot be easily seen and prepared for, change becomes increasingly intimidating. Eventually, at the bottom of a crumbling well of experience, with more consturction going on overhead, older people begin to buckle and cower, trembling, irrelevant, powerless, whimpering with feeble echoes to be left alone.

Or, intellectually, people can have their thoughts riding a kite above the embankments of life's events, using the vantage point to see into the past and the future, as well as the Big Picture of the present. Mentally fit, readers continue to grow in mental and emotional stature to the point that the pummeling of current events strikes them about the ankles rather than the head and shoulders.

The wagon maker may not have been able to grasp the advantages and "natural progression" of the airplane. I allow that my concerns and lament over the decline of voluntary, "sport" or "exercise" reading may be a near-sighted panic over beneficial changes. Given, given.

But the winds of brilliant words ingested for many decades and from many, many "chefs", lifting the kite of my perspective, say that everything ahead is not progress, and that evolution includes more extinction than improvement. Adaptation for survival demands fitness. If humanity cannot outrun and outfight technologically-assisted trends to entropy, homo sapiens may endure, but human reasoning and culture will atrophy and die.

And as brute animals go, man is not the most suitable to survive. Without critical thought, even rabbits, in numbers, can destroy us.