Some people find themselves in unexpected yet highly excitable moments when watching their underdog team win a game, when they find a dollar on the street, or run into a long lost friend. I feel that sudden rush of joy when I come across a passage in an article or story that stops me and really makes me think. I’m talking about the few sentences that you read over and over and call to share with a friend (maybe that’s just me).
So today I was lucky enough to experience one of those moments while reading an article in The New Yorker that made reference to the fact that as a society we are not reading as much as we used to:
“Perhaps readers venture so readily outside because what they experience in solitude gives them confidence. Perhaps reading is a prototype of independence. No matter how much one worships an author, Proust wrote ‘all he can do is give us desires.’ Reading somehow gives us the boldness to act on them. Such a habit might be quite dangerous for a democracy to lose.”
I can’t pinpoint every detail or idea that this passage provoked-however-my first thought was praise the reader. In many films and stories, the girl with the book sitting under the tree is the outcast, the loner, the inactive page scanner — when, in fact, she is the one shaping our world. We need to look at reading as an “activity,” not a passive “pastime”. Maybe if as a society we get back to thinking of reading as an active adventure, then this decline in reading will experience a new jolt of energy. Some of you may already think this way — cheers to you. Here’s to the readers — who sit for a couple of hours and take in the words of others but then go change the world.
