Reading for Pleasure

As I mentioned in my last posting, I've been reading back issues of TLS, something I find myself doing every year about this time. I realize that I've not been keeping up with the weekly arrival of new issues, and I want both to get caught up on the book news and also to get some fair return on my money. I don't know what my annual subscription now costs me, since it's on automatic billing to my credit card, but I do know it went over $100.00 per year some time ago. And I'm of a generation that still thinks $100.00 is a lot of money to spend for anything, and most certainly for a subscription to a weekly tabloid.

Lately I've been noticing pieces, usually in those central essays that I always enjoy reading -- NB by J.C. and the freelance pieces by Hugo Williams and Michael Greenberg -- about the demise of literature (especially poetry) and lamentations over the disappearance of a literary canon of agreed upon classics. I recall one of my former professors, R.J. Kaufmann, once said that you know something is already history when everyone feels the need to give testimony to its importance. That's the thought that keeps running through my mind when I come upon these pieces about celebrities reading their favorite poetry or telling stories about the books that changed their lives. Recently the National Endowment for the Arts issued a report they titled Reading at Risk that demonstrates an alarming decline in reading, especially among the young. Among most of the people I encounter, reading is still a favorite pastime, but how long can this last? And what are they reading?

Of course, everyone has a different idea about which books are really important. I still think that the best books are the old ones, but if you have to convince someone that reading Homer can be rewarding for reasons other than passing some required course in school, R.J. Kaufmann was probably right in saying the battle has already been lost. On the other hand, if I had to explain why I find The Iliad so fascinating, especially when I'm not particularly fond of warfare, I would have a pretty hard time explaining that it's not so much the fighting and the carnage that I enjoy, as the view of humanity that Homer gives us. That's true of all really great works of literature. Perhaps it's depressing that human beings have changed so little over these last three thousand years, but it's also somehow comforting to see that you don't need advanced technology or any special instruments or machinery to measure human vices and virtues.

In time canons change, with changing taste and shifting interests and obsessions. Dante thought Statius was the equal of Virgil, or nearly so. Now Virgil is rarely read, even in translation, and Statius is virtually unknown, even to Latin students. Who reads Milton these days? Or Tennyson? And closer to our own time, we've seen John Dos Passos and Thomas Wolfe drop from sight, with Hemingway also slipping from view. But nothing compares with the modern demise of poetry. Who buys poetry books these days or reads it for pleasure? Who was the last genuine American poet, recognized by ordinary readers? Was it Robert Frost? Carl Sanburg? Perhaps it was Allen Ginsberg.

Times change and we move on in our lives and in literature as well. I can imagine a time when most of the books I hold dear will be unknown, their authors largely forgotten. But what about reading as a human pastime? Reading is such a solitary pleasure, one not given to our multitasking environments. You can plug yourself into your iPod and go about your business, isolated in your own audio environment, but still part of the passing scene. That's harder to do while reading a book. When you read, the book tends to take over, and leaves you few resources to devote to other matters. I've seen many drivers plugged into their music, perhaps even listening to an audio book, but I would worry if they were actually reading.

Who was it said that reading is an unnatural act? Perhaps we are at the beginning of a new oral/aural age, an age of semi-literacy in which reading for pleasure will be as rare as playing Contract Bridge, something done mainly by old people who learned how to do it in their childhood or early youth. Can the world survive without reading for pleasure? I suspect it can, and it will. They tell us that even Socrates was suspicious of writing, and one presumes of reading also. He thought it would dull the memory. I think it will be a sad thing when reading for pleasure becomes more or less extinct, but then there will be more time for movies and music and reality television. In fact, it will probably all seem rather familiar to those who once read an old book by Aldous Huxley called Brave New World.