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August 4, 2005
Books as Friends
mentioned recently that I thought J.K. Rowling was single-handedly bringing back to our planet both literacy and the love of good books with her Harry Potter series. I remember wandering the libraries as a child, holding and smelling good old leather-bound volumes on Ancient Egypt and Platonic philosophy and Newton's Mathematical Principles.
I loved, not only reading, but also holding and feeling the novels of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick. Not just hardbound books, but paperbacks as well. Treasuring the mysteries of Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen and John D. MacDonald.
So after many years of thinking that the youngsters were going too far in the direction of television, movies, and computer games, it's heartening to see them return to the good old-fashioned book. But I wonder how tenuous a hold the book has.
We live in an age where even school principals will occasionally admit not reading books or thinking them out-of-date. I have a friend that admits how he has over 100 books on his Palm Pilot. (Who in the hell can read those darned things? If he can do it, I admire him for it, but where is the feel of the book? Where is the smell of the leather?)
Harlin Ellison, the science-fiction/moral fantasy writer, wrote a brilliant essay in a collection his stories called Strange Wine. The essay was called, "What Killed the Dinosaurs? And You Don't Look So Terrific Yourself." (The next time you're in a bookstore, pick up a copy and read the essay. If you don't like heavy-duty, moralistic science-fiction, then sit in the bookstore and read the essay.)
He would cite random examples of television's impact on society:
How one student rejected reading of books as not real, because it was your imagination, and your imagination is not real.
How kids could have a live person talking to them being filmed on one side of the classroom, while a TV showing the live broadcast sat on the other side of the room, and how the kids would all look at the TV rather than the live person in front of them. Because the TV seemed more real.
How only a small percentage of people by more than a single book a year.
Recently, you may have heard that a poll of college students revealed that fewer than 5% actually read an entire book in the last year.
His thesis was simple: Television puts everything out there in such a way that you do not need to exercise your imagination. In fact, your imagination atrophies without the kind of exercise you get from reading a book, which he notes is a participatory adventure. And unlike television, it requires the reader to activate the book, reinterpret it in personal terms, participate in the creative act. Both the writer and the reader create a world. The template is the book.
Ellison also quotes Issac Asimov from an essay in which he postulates the perfect entertainment cassette:
A cassette as ordinarily viewed makes sound and casts light. That is its purpose, of course, but must sound and light obtrude on others who are not involved or interested? The ideal cassette would be visible and audible only to the person using it.... We could imagine a cassette that is always in perfect adjustment; that starts automatically when you look at it; that stops automatically when you cease to look at it; that can play forward or backward, quickly or slowly, by skips or with repetition, entirely at your pleasure.... Surely, that's the ultimate dream device--a cassette that may deal with any of an infinite number of subjects, fictional or non-fictional, that is self-contained, portable, non-energy-consuming, perfectly private and largely under the control of the will....
Must this remain only a dream? Can we expect to have such a cassette some day?... We not only have it now, we have had it for many centuries. The ideal I have described is the printed word, the book, the object you now hold--light private, and manipulable at will.... Does it seem to you that the book, unlike the cassette I have been describing, does not produce sound and images? It certainly does.... You cannot read without hearing the words in your mind and seeing the images to which they give rise. In fact, they are your sounds and images, not those invented for you by others, and are therefore better.... The printed word presents minimum information, however. Everything but that minimum must be provided by the reader--the intonation of words, the expressions on faces, the actions, the scenery, the background, must all be drawn out of that long line of black-on-white symbols.
The point is, television numbs the imagination, whereas books (and blogs) strengthen it.
The dinosaurs, how they died. The imagination is important, not only for a thriving life, but also for survival. The dinosaurs had no imagination, no ability to be creative and to think themselves through their situations.
Jane Healy wrote a book recently called Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think And What We Can Do About It in which she cites studies showing that since the 1970s, and especially since the widespread use of computers, the brains of children are literally different than the brains of their parents. Excessive TV and computer watching has rewired their brains in ways that's significantly different from the brains of those of us brought up as readers.
One of the greatest gifts we can give to the young is the love of reading, the love of books. Not just for the pleasure and the information. But also for the exercise of their imaginations.
For a reader, a book can be just as good as babysitter as a television. (Almost every parent has discovered how you can calm down restless kids by turning on the television. Few reflect on why that actually might be dangerous to their minds.)
And for me, books have always been like real friends. Where else could I hang out with a Socrates or a Shakespeare or a Travis McGee or a Lazarus Long or a Harry Potter? Don't underestimate the power of imagination to make valuable and instructive friends. To have conversations with long-dead minds, even it they are white males (although the idea people have that Socrates would be considered a white male shows some ignorance of the nature of the people of ancient Greece.)
(I should also point out that just as some books are friends, others can be enemies. They can poison you, talk you into behaviors pernicious to your well-being. Convince you to harm yourself and others.)
Good books, and I think good blogs, can fill your life with very real and supportive friends. They can create a community around you that can do much more than your television. As much as I am a fan of TV shows and film, I always strive to put as much time into reading as I do into television watching. Why? Because television numbs the imagination and shortens the attention span, while books nourish the imagination and strengthen the creative faculties.
The dinosaurs lived for millions of years, and when conditions changed, they did not have the creative imagination to survive.
But maybe, with Harry Potter and blogs, our children will have a chance.
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Posted by witnit at August 4, 2005 9:05 AM
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