How Reading Can Keep Us Safe

— Distraction is as much a threat to culture as censorship —

Yesterday concluded Banned Books Week, the American Library Association’s annual national event to celebrate “the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment.”

On Thursday night I had the honor of speaking at a Banned Books Week celebration, and then reading publicly from a banned book, George Orwell’s 1984.

Here are my remarks:

When we celebrate books, or rise to defend them, even in a gathering like this one, what we’re really celebrating, what we really defend, is the survival and wellbeing of the Individual. I think that’s important to remember.

A book comes alive only in the single, solitary consciousness of an individual. It begins its life in the consciousness of the writer, and finds its apotheosis in the consciousness of the reader.

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the book-burner Montag says in a moment of illumination:

Last night I thought about all the kerosene I’ve used in the past ten years. And I thought about the books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. …It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it’s all over.

A book cannot exist without an individual to write it, and it cannot really come alive or make its meaning or do its work or become memorable until an individual takes it down off the shelf, opens it, falls quiet, and reads.

So when we protect books against censorship we protect the expressive Individual as creator and as receiver. We protect the writer or reader whose thoughts, feelings, or imaginings may stand at odds to a status quo. We protect what is idiosyncratic, nonconformist, visionary, or even eccentric, and see that it remains a possibility in the cultural dialogue. We not only say yes to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but we open our arms to the new Whitman of today.

We do all this in the belief — not only that books should be vehicles of free expression — but that readers thrive among us, that the individual still wishes to take a book down off the shelf, open it, fall quiet, and read.

But the truth is that quieting down and reading is getting harder and harder. David Ulin wrote about it in the L.A. Times back in August:

Sometime late last year…I noticed I was having trouble sitting down to read. …It isn’t a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else’s world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine. …After spending hours reading e-mails and fielding phone calls in the office, tracking stories across countless websites, I find it difficult to quiet down. I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail…

And Nicholas Carr wrote about it in The Atlantic Monthly a year earlier.

Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. … I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. … The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online.

Many of us, even the writers among us, know exactly the feelings Ulin and Carr describe. And we’ve seen lots of similar articles and editorials in the last few years.

It’s hard to sit still. It’s hard to focus. And this raises questions: If even the readers among us struggle to attend to the printed page, what does that mean for books? What does it mean for the survival and wellbeing of the individual? What does it mean for censorship?

Censorship and banned books result, of course, from a social force that seeks to smother the individual, the idiosyncratic, the nonconformist. Censorship is an aspect of Group-Think.

This is old news. (Back in the mid-1800s John Stuart Mill referred to this Group-Think as the “tyrannical majority.” And in his novel 1984, George Orwell calls it “Orthodoxy.”)

Because it’s a social organism, Group-Think will always be with us in one form or another. So it’s a matter of making sure it doesn’t get in the way of individual thought.

Books can endanger Group-Think because, as Jonathan Franzen has said, they can teach us to be alone. Group-Think sees a threat in too many people learning to be alone.

“You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books,” says somebody in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, a famous banned book published in 1932.

Group-Think wants us cruising the aisles under fluorescent lights buying things, or sitting at home inside our digitalized TVs, or stuck in traffic subjected to FM advertisements engineered to keep us thinking about the next thing to buy.

Group-Think would prefer that you never power off, never log-off or leave the chatroom or silence your cell phone or turn off your video game for the sake of quieting down and learning to be alone with a book.

Years after Brave New World, Huxley warned us about:

…the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with … the more or less totally irrelevant.

Mankind, he said, has an “almost infinite appetite for distractions.”

Reality TV anyone? (And I say this as somebody who once had a full season obsession with America’s Next Top Model.)

Writing about television, Neil Postman took up Huxley’s theme. He pointed out that in the new “information age” distraction is as much a threat to culture as censorship, because being always distracted becomes a way of censoring ourselves. He said:

Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. But what we watch is…information packaged as entertainment. Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses would ignore that which does not amuse.

Can books amuse? Absolutely, if you can manage to quiet down and read them. But don’t skip out on primetime in order to test that assertion.

Group-Think wants you tuned in — always fixating on the latest news snippet, fixating on So-and-so’s slap-down of So-and-so, fixating on Tyra’s next Top Model Pick (count me guilty), fixating on PlayStation — and always socializing, text-messaging, e-mailing, Facebooking, MySpacing, Twittering.

We draft our own cultural death-certificate, and possibly the death-certificate of America itself when we consent to the suppression of a book.

But we draft that same tragic document when we involve ourselves in the distractions of mass culture to an extent where we end up basically ignoring books. When we give up the special habits of self-cultivation and deep consciousness that books offer us:

• how to be alone
• how to be quiet
• how to focus
• how to engage another consciousness at length — whether to cherish its views or reject them.

If we allow censorship, or if we just plain forget how to engage with the printed word — we effectively join in a process that strengthens Group-Think, a process that would, for fear of anarchy or social rot, eliminate individual consciousness, complete with all its worthier utterances.

Novelist Don DeLillo has said:

If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we’re talking about when we use the word ‘identity’ has reached an end.

As a fiction writer I believe that stories are, in a sense, sacred — not least because they offer a chance to engage with, dwell upon, challenge, be challenged by, things not immediately universal: the Taboo, the Other, the Unorthodox, the Inscrutable, the Mysterious, the Hard-To-Swallow, sometimes the Hard-To-Sympathize-With.

Stories are sacred not because they teach lessons or propound theories, ideas, or morals — but because they create an experience, they invite reflection, they provoke a long gaze. Because, in one mysterious way or another, they bring us home to ourselves.

In today’s techno-culture we should, I believe, take special care not to censor ourselves or to limit our own access to books of all kinds or to quality-time with the printed page.

I believe we should keep it a point of honor to log out, power off, quiet down, and remind ourselves how to be alone with a book.

This act of cultural defiance, reading books on a daily basis, is good for human consciousness, and it is our best and most reliable weapon against censorship, and against the Group-Think that engenders it.

We will never be safe from censorship, but where individual readers are strong we are safest.

Tonight, therefore, I want to borrow the recent words of Junot Diaz, 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner:

Let us give thanks to that most important agent of change, gathered here in great strength, let us give thanks to readers. …We readers, I suspect, will be remembered more than any individual writer for safeguarding that delicate web of human interconnectivity that so many forces wish to buy, capture, enslave, and mine. Readers will be remembered long after we are all gone for holding the line against the dehumanizing forces of our civilization.

So please, keep reading – or read more.

You may also enjoy:

“Do We Need a Cultural Bill of Rights?”

“A Soul-Affirming Vision of the Internet”

“In Defense of Solitude”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“The Ground Underfoot: Why Stories Matter”

“On Pilgrimage: The Ghosts Who Are My Teachers”