The art of reading

The dictum that ‘all good things are bad for children,’ has survived the test of time & advent of technology alike.

Finally being able to watch my childhood superheroes prance around the silver screen and pulverise super villains is quite an amazing feeling; one that combines wide-eyed wonder with misty-eyed nostalgia. Back in the days, when reading Marvel and DC comics was how children spent their study breaks, actually watching Thor wield the mighty Mjolnir, being able to see Hulk defeat the Abomination and hearing the Fantastic Four’s Thing shout “Its clobbering time!” was not something I could have even remotely imagined. Kids today may not be able relate to the fact that television was once a novelty, that there were no computers or video games and that your voice had to travel through underground copper wire to reach the person on the other end of a, yes, land line telephone. Unbelievable but true, I assure you.

Ironically, though just about everything else has changed, the dictum that ‘all good things are bad for children,’ has survived the test of time and the advent of technology alike. Even then, the conventionally wise believed that reading comics adversely impacted language skills. Au contraire; while comics might have popularised the usage of slang, with me they were responsible for inculcating the habit of reading. Believe me, it was a better option than countless hours spent playing video games, which is not good either for the mind or the body.

An article promoting reading when hardly anybody reads is in itself a paradox. However, as the saying goes, when there is nothing, there is hope. Wikipedia defines literacy as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently, and think critically about the written word. Avoiding the debate on knowledge and wisdom, there is no doubt that knowledge in any case precedes wisdom. Socrates first had knowledge to know, then the wisdom to accept that he knew nothing. And while knowledge can also be acquired through debate, reading remains the foremost way to acquire knowledge. Even then, it’s not quite enough. How useful is a high literacy rate when all it means is that people are able to read and write, but are unable to think?

Nevertheless, the importance of reading can simply be gauged from the rate of advances made after the advent of the Gutenberg printing press. Minus the ability to accumulate and store knowledge in print, one can only imagine where the world might be today. The ancient practice of transmitting knowledge through word of mouth and relying upon human memory for its preservation, with all due respect to Simonides, was hardly reliable. At best, the retention of this knowledge over the intervening centuries, was mediocre and had a limited audience. Without books, Newton could hardly have stood on the shoulders of giants. As someone rightly said, reading is to writing what hearing is to speaking.

The objective today, however, is not to promote books; it is to focus on the importance of reading in general. Personally, reading from an LCD screen is tiring for the eyes and quite distracting. The advantage in reading a book is the inability to click and wander across virtual space every few seconds. Those afflicted with the nigh-incurable habit of reading on the throne, must also abhor Kindle and Nook. Of course, how the mind can fully function while one is sitting on the pot is another ageless mystery…one that shall not, at least, be resolved in these pages. Not today, anyway.

“The difference between what you are today and what you will be a year later will be the people you meet and the books you read”. Apologies to the author for not giving due credit, since memory recall and Yahoo search have both failed to uncover his identity. The quote nonetheless remains a very perceptive observation. For the persistent cribber, please substitute books with the electronic device of choice.

Experience has confirmed the truism of this quote. The ability to store knowledge is irrelevant if it is never accessed. Reading feeds into knowledge which nurtures wisdom which, finally, is the key ingredient for the development of character. A friend, who loves to travel, had this brilliant insight (not that it had any practical impact on him): “no wonder the goras rule the world, anytime you see them at airports, trains or in the tube, they are reading books”.  Arguably, the rise and fall of civilisations is directly associated with their patronisation of the arts and sciences.

 Great rulers were cognizant of the need to encourage immigrants in order to supplement the knowledge “hanging in the air” around the seat of power. Here I must make a somewhat serendipitous observation that, irrespective of other conjectures, the current negative attitude of the only super power towards immigrants is surely the beginning of its decline. The universal truth being, of course, that nothing in this world is permanent and everything has a downfall.

The Knowledge ‘hanging in the air’, in any land, is the consolidated experience, knowledge and wisdom of its inhabitants. People generally learn from observing and learning from others. Variety in what constitutes those ‘others’ is therefore desirable. This is the reason that cities, and not towns or villages, are the drivers of innovation and growth. Nonetheless, even in cities, productivity and innovation is directly proportionate to the receptiveness for fresh thoughts.

 Positively speaking, the information age might have eliminated the need for a physical conduit to transfer knowledge. However, since technology has yet to develop a chip which can directly be implanted in the human brain, there is still no short cut to reading.

Unfortunately, reading is a dying art, as if irrefutably evidenced by the scarcity of book stores. The critics will rightly point out that eBooks don’t require physical outlets of sale, but a significant portion of the urban population don’t own hand-held devices and simply downloading books does not guarantee that they will actually be read. More critically, the quality of debate on electronic fora and social media seems to confirm the conclusion that nobody reads. If a nation does not read, it will not gain knowledge and wisdom will remain at best an illusion; so how can it be expected to vote intelligently?

Having established the importance of reading by directly linking it with the nation’s most passionate past time, there is still a need to destroy a few fallacies.

• First, reading fiction is not a waste of time. What is literature, if not the fiction of yesteryear? Reading the product of somebody’s imagination invariable enhances one’s own imagination. Don’t believe me? Then just consider Albert Einstein who said “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

• An inability to perfectly retain knowledge is a common failing of the human brain, and given that the existence of a photographic memory is not scientifically evidenced, odds are you’ll have to revisit what you’ve already read from time to time.  This is why French philosopher Roland Barthes said, “those who fail to re-read are obliged to read the same story everywhere.” Also, as you yourself change, your interpretation of something you read years back will also change. Try it out if you don’t believe me.

• Reading the first and last few pages of any given work does not provide the “gist of it”. According to the hermeneutical circle (google it for yourself), in order to get the gist of the whole, getting the gist of the parts is essential and vice versa. Speed reading gets you nowhere and summaries prepared by others are only as good as the summary writers’ own level of incompetence.

• Reading daily newspapers and weekly magazines is not enough either; in fact these also adversely impact the concentration span. Book reading, on the other hand, is pure extended pleasure. After having lost the habit of reading over the years, coming back to it was like scaling my own personal Mount Everest. The view from the literary heights was stupendous.

Perhaps someday a resourceful philanthropist might just be motivated to finance media programs focusing on book reviews or set up libraries or establish book clubs or even revive the Tea House culture amongst the elite. In the meantime, given that I’m neither wealthy nor a philanthropist, let’s just keep trying.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, November 18^th, 2012.

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