Once upon a time and age, Harper Lee said “Until I feared to lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing”. She has long been gone but her words linger and touch the heart (Or as Shakespeare would say liver) of an absentminded young adult who used to be a kid whose face was perpetually buried in a book for at least the first eighteen years of her life.
The next four years see a shift, from the written word to moving pictures and then never back again. Like a windscreen wiper that forgets that its essential purpose remains unfulfilled if it does not slot back into position again. Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home, well, as long as you remember it existed in the first place.
And so the windows get blurry but you keep driving until you crash inadvertently into Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and the truth dawns upon you faster than Arthur drew the sword from the stone and you say to yourself, ‘Merlin, what have I done?’
I will stop with the ill-thought-out metaphors and say this as plainly as possible (while still trying to remain publishable). I do not read anymore, and I’m sure this is true for a lot of people. Oh, but everyone has just the perfect excuse that fits their situation to explain away this oversight.
- Oh, well I grew up, and it’s the adult world and I have adult responsibilities, I just don’t find the time. (Oh! Well sorry to interrupt your 3-hour scrolling of Instagram to ask you this question)
Or the more despicable
- Well, it’s just easier to watch TV or Netflix. More accessible, you know? And quicker. (You say as a book lies at the foot of your bed while you begin the arduous process of booting your laptop, waiting for someone else’s Wifi to connect as you open a Netflix account not your own and proceed to spend 2 hours browsing through content.)
Or the slightly more justifiable
- I have never voluntarily read a book and will continue to never voluntarily read a book. Problem? ( No. At least that’s honest. You do you man.)
(Let’s pretend these justifications were given by real people and not myself. Except for the 3rd one. That was my cousin.)
The keyword here is ‘anymore’ and is aimed at people who have always loved to read but have stopped somewhere along the way, not quite being able to pinpoint why. It could be the rigours of law school where the constant pressure to do ‘useful things’ outweigh the simple pleasures derived from reading a book, where time is used as a precious yet paradoxical commodity, spent equally on work and procrastination. (Slight digression but ‘Procrastination’, in law school terms, is ‘Doing things which you wouldn’t ordinarily do, just to get away from doing work, but not doing things that you truly like because that would just make you feel guilty’).
That’s one part of it, but even in the brief time we chalk out for ourselves for leisurely activities, there must be discernment in what we choose to entertain ourselves with – which has changed over the years – a gradual but malignant evolution. It’s more subversive and universal than realized, and this phenomenon was spelt out by Ray Bradbury back in 1953 and I’ll tell you the reason a lot less eloquently than he told me in 2018.
The world moves faster now, faster than your fingers as you type out a reply to a meme tag, faster than your brain thinks because the thinking is done by Google and faster than you realize that all these advancements are snatching away something precious from you and not letting you realize it. Call it Capitalism, call it the Internet or call it the freakin 21st Century. Poor quality content available everywhere, consumed because it’s convenient (Riverdale’s trending, let’s check it out) and so you subject your brain to utter shit, till your very brain cells rebel and your thinking slows and all you can remember at the end of the day is the names of all the Kardashian sisters.
“The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.”
“The television is ‘real’. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’.”
Unlike Ray Bradbury, this is not me saying that all TV is bad, far from it. Of course there’s brilliant stuff to be found to feed your brain, however, it has to be said that moving pictures that construct an easy to follow scene is less challenging to the brain than conjuring the entire scene in your head, with no visual stimuli. There is a lot to be learned from movies but that’s a whole other story, but the point is reading cannot or rather, should not be replaced for the simple reason that it is indeed, irreplaceable. And you’ll be losing out on vital experiences if you’re willing to make this foolhardy sacrifice. And oftentimes, you don’t realise the cost.
When was the last time you read an entire book? When was the last time you read half a book? (Skimming through Bangia absolutely does not count). For that matter, when was the last time you watched 8 seasons of a show without stopping midway and moving on to a miniseries with 1.5 episodes because your attention span wasn’t quite what it used to be. You can’t sit still anymore without constantly being technologically attuned for fast-paced entertainment, and even the shows/movies get shorter and shorter to hold your ever-dwindling attention but you shrug it away because really, can it compare to that YouTube video of that kid falling flat on his face, played on loop?
“Hope may be the thing that pulls you forward, maybe the thing that keeps you going, but that it’s dangerous, that it’s painful and risky, that it’s making a dare in the world and when has the world ever let us win a dare?” Today, it will.
Therefore, it needs to be wittingly called out. The first step is acknowledging the traps of the modern world, fighting it consciously one Oscar Wilde at a time and then proceeding to make the long, aching but heroic journey with Frodo and Sam back to the Shire.
‘Time is a valuable thing, watch it fly by as the pendulum swings’ and attempt to be less careless, and thoughtless with it and begin this enterprise by spending it equally on Oz as much as Ozark.
So, this is a call to arms, to fight and remember that firstly, your 12-year-old self would be super disappointed and disdainful of you, secondly that what you need right now is unshakeable determination reminiscent of Travis’ unabashed pursuit of Craig and lastly, that before the White Walkers, came the White Witch and so you must prepare yourself for battle, and prepare well because your enemy is everywhere – in your home, in the billboards you pass by at work, at your fingertips – selling you the idea that instant gratification is everything and if you don’t fight as goddamn hard as you can, the world of Ray Bradbury’s worst fears will come true and the books will begin to burn.
Maybe the reality of it all will hit you in the head as harshly as Anne brought down that slate on Gilbert’s head or worse, when you realize that Jesse-Owens-loving-Rudy is no more but the Apple is here now (in more ways than one) and Eve, you really took a chunk out of it so it’s about time you left the Garden of Eden.
“Do you understand now why books are hated and feared? Because they reveal the pores on the face of life. The comfortable people want only the faces of the full moon, wax, faces without pores, hairless, expressionless. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
– Priyanka Ashok, Semester IX
Jury's Out 