A Reader’s Manifesto - Open The Magazine

READING: THE TERM is as generous and imprecise as “love.” So often it means more than just the word-by-word deciphering of the printed page.

For while it can be many things, serious reading is above all an agency of self-making.

What will be the fate of reading? I don’t mean the left-to-right movement of the eyes as we take in information, but the age-old practice of addressing the world by way of this inward faculty of imagination. I mean reading as a filtering of the complexities of the real through artistic narrative, reflection, and orchestration of verbal imagery.

But Quentin believed in reading as a lifeline to the past—to the store of experience that made the foundation of our species. By assembling our thoughts like risers in a staircase the generations would climb. Those who could draw from this reservoir would exist beyond the jealous shackles of time, grasp the utterness of contingency, and know the wi

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities