Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society,” Carl Sagan insisted at the end of his life in arguing for reading as the path to democracy. “Someone reading a book is a sign of order in the world,” wrote the poet Mary Ruefle a generation later.
Long before Sagan and Ruefle, Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929–March 27, 2012) examined the emancipatory power of reading in her preface to On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966–1978 (public library) — the indispensable collection of essays and speeches that gave us Rich on honorable human relationships and what “truth” really means.
Writing in 1978, Rich considers the gendered power dynamics of the written word:
The decline in adult literacy means not merely a decline in the capacity to read and write, but a decline in the impulse to puzzle out, brood upon, look up in the dictionary, mutter over, argue about, turn inside-out in verbal euphoria, the “incomparable medium” of language — Tillie Olsen’s term. And this decline comes, ironically, at a moment in history when women, the majority of the world’s people, have become most aware of our need for real literacy, for our own history, most searchingly aware of the lies and distortions of the culture men have devised, when we are finally prepared to take on the most complex, subtle, and drastic revaluation ever attempted of the condition of the species.
Contemplating what the television screen has displaced — a displacement of critical thinking only exacerbated by the computer and smartphone screens in the decades since — Rich presages the problem of wisdom in the age of information and writes:
People grow up who not only don’t know how to read, a late-acquired skill among the world’s majority; they don’t know how to talk, to tell stories, to sing, to listen…
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