The London Underground used to be a happy place for authors. We would get into a carriage and see rows of people, studiously ignoring their neighbors – unless their neighbor was a dog – and reading a newspaper or an actual, physical book. The same went for the New York subway and, to a lesser extent, all train networks.
Today you get into a carriage and everyone is staring into the same phone screens that they stare into most of the rest of the day.
Books give us some ability to see through, as well as put into perspective, the troubles of our time
I try not to be judgmental about this, since I always try to see the best in people, however disgusting they might look. So I tell myself that perhaps some portion of the passengers are reading Thucydides or the latest highbrow novel. But I doubt it. The phone today is such a distracting device that during a 30-minute train journey in which someone might once have got through a chapter of a novel, today they have seen 100 videos of cats being attacked by a boa constrictor or Piers Morgan being attacked by a fact. And it’s not just a problem for other people. It’s a problem for all of us. I suspect most people reading this will have noticed that we read fewer books than we used to and spend ever more time on our devices. People present this as a problem for the kids, but it’s a problem for the adults too.
A slew of recent books and articles have lamented the provable decline in book-reading. But it’s a slightly fruitless genre. After all, none of these works is ever going to be picked up by someone who doesn’t read books and wants a good spanking over the fact. It would be like a normal, well-adjusted person voluntarily attending a party conference.
The trouble is that not reading books is now not only lamented – it is celebrated. I read an article the other day about an online influencer called Alix Earle, 25, who is said to be worth $20 million. Asked to name the last book she had read she replied, without hesitation: “I’ve never read a book… maybe Dr. Seuss.” It reminded me of an evening in New York earlier this year when another online influencer called Clavicular came into a club I was having a drink in. The walls of said club were decorously furnished with someone’s library. Another guest asked the live-streamer whether he was into books at all. Young Clav explained that he didn’t really think reading books was worthwhile to him in a “time-maxxing” way. He explained that reading through a really long book didn’t seem likely to enhance his ascent in the way that various other activities might do. Such as hammering his jaw, taking meth or shooting dead alligators. But I digress.
The point is that whereas there was a time when confessing to being utterly incurious about the world of books was something to be embarrassed about, today there seems to be little shame in it. Those of us who do care about books and ideas are slightly stumped by how to respond to this. After all, at some point all authors and readers have to contend with one unassailable fact. Which is that we have all known very good people in our lives who do not read books: people who contribute a great deal to the people around them, who are loving and decent and everything else that is noble and good. Likewise we have all met people who seem to have read every book in the world and are total shits. In other words, reading does not make us good.
Yet there is something that books give us that is surely measurable to some extent. What is it? I would say it is among much else some greater sense of perspective on the world. I suspect that at some point even Alix Earle or Clavicular might ask themselves what their life is for and whether they are using their time on this Earth entirely well. It is hard to shrug off the thought that they would be better off in many ways if they could spend a few days with Marcus Aurelius or Dostoyevsky. Not least because it is unlikely that any of us in a normal year are going to meet someone with a comparable amount of insight into the world or people.
Books also give us some ability to see through, as well as put in perspective, the troubles of our own time. Of immediate practical use is the fact that they give us some clarity about how language can be used for good and ill. This week I saw a headline which read “Iranian small boat migrants charged over Yom Kippur terror plot.” My immediate thought was how sweet “small boat migrants” sounds. An image was conjured up of really quite diminutive people leaving their dinky little boat to do something naughty. That is a trick that language can play, and it is being played on us all the time. Remember the discussion of “family voting” after the Gorton and Denton by-election earlier this year? What a lovely, healthy activity that sounds: “Come on kids, get in the car, we’re off for a bit of family voting.”
If you know language you know how you can be manipulated by it. In the same way that if you know history you know how you can be either led or led astray by it. If you have a mind filled with real and fictional stories from the past you can better decide whether it is time to hide under a rock or weigh up the cries and alarms of our time and suffer through them.
I suppose that the main thing that reading gives us (apart from pleasure and some wisdom) is an ability not to be subject only to “present-ism.” It gives us a sense – like a painting on a French cave-wall – that someone has been here before, felt what we have felt and managed to navigate this mysterious thing called life. It is a sad person who gets to the end of their life no wiser or more informed than when they started it. To put it in terms that Gen Z might understand, reading is one of the best “hacks” we have. But then again, most readers don’t have $20 million in their pockets.
Comments