A Reader on Reading

In certain societies in which the intellectual act has a prestige of its own, as in many aboriginal societies throughout the world, the teacher (elder, shaman, instructor, keeper of the tribe’s memory) has an easier task in fulfilling his or her obligations, since most activities in those societies are subordinate to the act of teaching. But in most societies, the intellectual act has no prestige whatsoever. The budget allotted to education is the first to be cut; most of our leaders are barely literate; our national values are purely economical. Lip service is paid to the concept of literacy and books are officially celebrated, but effectively our schools and universities are becoming mere training grounds for the workforce, instead of places in which curiosity and reflection are fostered. “Think less, work more,” was the message delivered on 21 July 2007 by Christine Lagarde, then finance minister of Nicolas Sarkozy. “We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come,” said Madame Lagarde. “This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.” In France as elsewhere, our motto, like that of a certain laptop, has become “Faster than thought,” a quality Pinocchio’s school would no doubt have endorsed. The opposition is valid, since thought requires time and depth, the two essential qualities of the act of reading.

Teaching is a slow, difficult process, two adjectives that have in our time become faults instead of terms of praise. It seems almost impossible to convince most of us today of the merits of slowness and deliberate effort. And yet, Pinocchio will only learn if he is not in a hurry to learn, and will only become a full individual through the effort required to learn slowly. Whether in Collodi’s age of parroted school texts or in ours of almost infinite regurgitated facts available at our fingertips, it is relatively easy to be superficially literate, to follow a sitcom, to understand an advertising joke, to read a political slogan, to use a computer. But to go further and deeper, to have the courage to face our fears and doubts and hidden secrets, to question the workings of society in regard to ourselves and to the world, in order to learn to think, we need to learn to read in other ways, differently. Pinocchio may turn into a boy at the conclusion of his adventures, but ultimately he still thinks like a puppet.

Almost everything around us encourages us not to think, to be content with commonplaces, with dogmatic language that divides the world neatly into white and black, good and evil, them and us. This is the language of extremism, sprouting up everywhere these days, reminding us that it has not disappeared. To the difficulties of reflecting on paradoxes and open questions, on contradictions and chaotic order, we respond with the age-old cry of Cato the Censor in the Roman Senate, “Carthago delenda est!” “Carthage must be destroyed!” — the other civilization must not be tolerated, dialogue must be avoided, rule must be imposed by exclusion or annihilation. This is the cry of dozens of contemporary leaders. This is a language that pretends to communicate but, under several guises, simply bullies; it expects no answer except obedient silence. “Be sensible and good,” the Blue Fairy tells Pinocchio in the end, “and you’ll be happy.” Many a political slogan can be reduced to this inane piece of advice.

To step outside that constricted vocabulary of what society considers “sensible and good” into a vaster, richer, and, above all, more ambiguous one is terrifying, because this other realm of words has no boundaries and is equivalent to thought, emotion, intuition. This infinite vocabulary is open to us if we will take the time and make the effort to explore it, and over our many centuries it has wrought words out of experience in order to reflect experience back to us, to allow us to understand the world and ourselves. It is greater and longer lasting than Pinocchio’s ideal library of sweetmeats because it includes it, metaphorically, and can lead to it, concretely, by allowing us to imagine ways in which we can change a society in which Pinocchio starves, is beaten and exploited, is refused the state of childhood, is asked to be obedient and to be happy in his obedience. To imagine is to dissolve barriers, to ignore boundaries, to subvert the vision of the world imposed upon us. Though Collodi was unable to grant his puppet this final state of self-discovery, he intuited, I believe, the possibilities of his imaginative powers. And even when asserting the importance of bread over words, he knew well that every crisis of society is ultimately a crisis of the imagination.

Candide in Sanssouci

“I only wanted to see what the garden was like.”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 2