A Reader on Reading

Both qualities, however, respond to a view of the world. The world, as we recognize from the moment we are born, is a library of signs, an archive of mysterious texts, a gallery of compelling images, some arbitrary or haphazard, some deliberately created, which we feel we are meant to decipher and read. A natural inclination, what Professor Giovanna Franci calls “the anxiety to interpret,” leads us to believe that everything is language, pictures of a vocabulary whose key may be lost, or never existed, or must be wrought again to unlock the pages of the universal book. Plants, animals, clouds, the faces and gestures of others, landscapes and sea currents, constellations and forest tracks have their equivalent in pictographs and ideograms, in letters and coded signals with which we attempt to mirror our experience of the world. The Aztecs called their colored manuscripts maps, a better word to make explicit this relationship than our neutral text.

But there is also such a thing as a false map that leads nowhere except back to itself. The Hatter has been father to a huge mass of such cartography produced in the past twenty or thirty years by philosophers, sociologists, and economists, who, couching their arguments in elegant language and protected by some version of freedom of speech, defend the virtues of greed and self-enrichment and lend intellectual weight to those who use their power to achieve them. Holding on to what he has and yet always grasping for something else, the Hatter offers others nothing and, pointing to his laid-out table, tells the others to take more, and to believe that “it’s very easy to take more than nothing …” It is not very easy to take more than nothing, as millions on our planet know. But the rules of the mad tea party are those of the world we have constructed so that we can keep for ourselves vast spaces meant for many, so that we can offer wine that is not there and “more” tea to someone who has had none, so that we can appropriate fresh territory after we have spoiled the one we have been occupying. To amass more than we can possibly need or enjoy, to propose to others participation in a common culture that is being eroded daily and gradually replaced with “nothing,” to suggest to the poor and needy that they help themselves to “more” of the common wealth when they had none in the first place, to clear-cut, mine out, or fish dry vast areas of our planet and then move on to others, leaving behind our spillage and waste, are the methods of our global madness, regardless of whether we are dealing with fellow human beings, forests, seas, the earth we inhabit, or the air we breathe. They are methods by which we appear to share fortunes and misfortunes with others when in reality we share nothing, we hand over nothing, we hide our wine and hold on to our tea and feel comforted by what we believe we see.

“When we look into a mirror,” wrote Harold Pinter in his Nobel Prize lecture, “we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror—for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us. I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory. If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us — the dignity of man.”

At the Mad Hatter’s table sit today not the imaginary creatures met by Alice but painfully real beings: the inheritors of Cortés, reducing all creation to sticks and stones; the merchants for whom the only measure of value is that of financial profit and who believe that the surest way to bigger earnings is the lowering of the public’s intellectual level; the catechists, for whom art is not a dialogue and an exchange of questions but a series of simpleminded and stifling answers; the rag-and-bone vendors who can turn anything into a salable commodity; the philosophers who, in the name of personal considerations or abstract notions of justice, lend arguments to those in power, and false justification; the egotists who, under the protection of civic freedom, believe that tolerance is a virtue that allows for the distinction between “those above” and “those below;” the advertisers of trite virtues and creators of false needs; the religious leaders who believe that the deity has granted their church, and no other, grace, illumination, and a privileged position above that of all other creeds; the revolutionaries for whom there can be no purification without destruction; the political leaders for whom wealth and power are proof of righteousness and moral authority. In a word, the enemies of “the dignity of man.”