The treasure of reading

Since their emergence on earth, humans have harboured an innate curiosity to comprehend themselves and the world around them. Over the millennia, they have used different tools and techniques in this regard. Sensory perception, imagination, observation, personal experiences, meditation, supernatural accounts, and trial and error have served this purpose for early humans. Initially, humans communicated through non-verbal signs and gestures. The invention of language, however, added richness to individual and collective human experience. With language and writing, humans could easily communicate within their minds, crossmatch, verify, preserve, and authenticate the observations and experiences they had been through. Language enabled humans to reproduce their knowledge and preserve it in written form.

Though personal life experiences, setbacks, hardships, starvation, deprivation, failure, and society teach us many things, they are painfully expensive. In other words, it is beyond the capacity of each individual to experience and learn all the lessons and knowledge that societies have produced over the millennia on their own. However, reading is one of the most valuable and rewarding activities one can engage in to cultivate a treasure trove of knowledge. Libraries, metaphorically dubbed as paradise by Jorge Luis Borges, house this treasure of knowledge and enlightenment.

Reading enriches and nourishes us in different priceless ways. First, reading adds to knowledge and human intellect. The inexhaustible treasure of knowledge introduces us to a wealth of information, ideas, experiences, and perspectives. It helps us gain insight into the dynamics of society enabling us to understand the overlapping structural and functional social norms.

Second, reading stimulates vital cognitive faculties and nurtures objective and critical thinking, creativity, imagination, reasoning, and problem-solving skills. It exposes us to different perspectives, encourages questioning and evaluation and enables us to form informed opinions. It unlocks the human mind’s inherent wisdom.

Third, reading helps us travel through history and explore the cultures of our forefathers providing us with lessons to learn from. It assists us in navigating the realities of life more successfully.

Fourth, reading helps build empathy and social harmony and adds to humanistic values. By immersing ourselves in the characters and lives of others, we begin to understand human behaviour. The tapestry of emotions underlying human tendencies helps us empathise with the struggles of others, fostering connectivity, exposing commonalities, and leading to a more compassionate society.

Fifth, reading makes us tolerant of human and ideological diversity. It develops rationality and logical discourse. Learning about diverse characters, cultures, thoughts, ideas, and ways of life allows us to become more accommodative and appreciative of everything around us.

Sixth, reading has therapeutic effects. It releases stress by diverting our attention from the strains of life. It serves as a bountiful escape from the awful moments of life. Last, but not the least, reading saves us from wasting time, being passive, ignorant, prejudiced, bigoted, myopic, and socially enslaved.

Unfortunately, most people in our part of the world have yet to realise the benefits of reading, let alone cultivate them. It is evident from the declining reading aptitude and culture.

Another intriguing irony that testifies to this unfortunate reality is the scarcity of libraries. This distressing and multifaceted crisis in our society is not a development that occurred in isolation. It is the culmination of over seven and a half decades of meticulously orchestrated efforts by the forces of the status quo to ossify the elite culture.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 2^nd, 2023.

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