― George R.R. Martin
I’m amazed when casual acquaintances confess they never read a book.
They don’t seem embarrassed or shy about admitting the fact, and some even wear their declaration like a red badge of courage.
While I admire their honesty, I’m saddened to think print media is declining—it reminds me of Frank Strang’s declaration in Equus that ‘printing is a failing trade.’
Take reading fiction, for instance—it broadens our outlook and allows us to escape the limits of our own time and space.
We can ‘try on’ other peoples’ lives and experience life through another set of eyes. Our imaginations are challenged and we are free to direct our own inner movie, casting our own characters and colouring our own picture.
How else can we explain the often heard comment outside cinemas? ‘The movie was good, but I preferred the novel.’
What they really preferred was the film they directed in their own heads.
Baby Boomers can recall a time before TV, staring at the back of the radio, marvelling at all the lighted vacuum tubes and trying to picture the narration.
The ability to describe a thing in words or to convey an experience was highly important in a pre-television culture.
T. S. Eliot once remarked, ‘I gotta use words when I talk to you.’
Not so today.
In the technologically advanced twenty first century, there are all kinds of media available for communicating—most of which, do not require many or any words.
In an age of Skype and Facebook and Twitter, words become shortened into a semiotic system of pre-literate mumbo-jumbo.
It’s no longer necessary to say exactly what you mean—you just need to get close and then throw in a picture or an emoticon—they’ll know what you mean.
Whatever!
I remember sitting in one of Northrop Frye's lectures and watching as he responded to a tongue-tied and frustrated student who blurted out, ‘You know what I mean, Doctor Frye.’
The good Doctor sighed, took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief and said quietly, ‘Unless you use words, my friend, even you don’t know what you mean.’
So true.
In June, my wife and I visited a little bookstore in Cayuga Ontario—we were there to arrange for one of my book signings and to drop off some novels on consignment.
What we saw when we walked in the door astounded us and warmed our hearts.
There were about a dozen children ranging in age from three to fifteen, happily being read to by an older girl and participating in creating spin art—and thoroughly enjoying themselves!
Perhaps it’s not necessary for children to be so immersed in developing technologies—any teacher will tell you, parents obsess on this matter.
Perhaps reading a good book and sharing with friends is just as important not only in cultivating the mind, but in teaching social skills.
Who knows? People might eventually come to see that social media is really anti-social media and face-to-face conversation is a sacred privilege akin to Martin Buber’s concept of an I-Thou relationship.
Eventually, parents might even insist that children learn to read and make the world mean first, before trying all the short cuts to instant communication.