No wonder not everybody is up to it
March 6, 2008
I read an essay from Harpers, February, 2008, by Ursula K. Le Guin, titled "Staying Awake; notes on the alleged decline of reading." I'm still letting it sink in but I wanted to share this passage with you:
"...readers aren't viewers; they recognize their pleasure as different from that of being entertained. Once you've pressed the ON button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness – not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in you living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won't move your mind unless you give it you mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it – everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not 'interactive' with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it."
This essay on the ‘supposed’ demise of reading, gives me hope. Le Guin undresses the big publishers. Growth of market share, growth of readers, fiscal bottom lines? Le Guin calls bullshit.
A while back I was talking in this space about my struggle to define, or at least, come to an understanding of what "literature" is. Perhaps, literature and art are concerned with beauty(and of course, the absence of beauty), and with a consideration of the human condition. The aesthetics of things are important. But perhaps not just the outward appearance; the spiritual aesthetics.
2 Comments
1. Laurence Miall had this to say: Mar 09, 2008 ~ 17:22 ~ #
Literature is a full engagement with life. Writing that isn’t literature is just a distraction from life.
Those are my pretentious two cents’ worth. I read the same article. It was a keeper.