The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution. Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.
From the Curious About Everything newsletter (Issue #56) from Jodi Ettenberg comes this brilliant essay by James Marriott of The Times on the death of reading. I encourage you to read it.
For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence.
The classics have been preserved over the centuries because they contain, in Matthew Arnold’s famous phrase, “the best that has been thought and said”.
The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading non-fiction — science, history, philosophy, travel writing — we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.
Smartphones are robbing of us of these consolations.
The epidemic of anxiety, depression and purposeless afflicting young people in the twenty-first century is often linked to the isolation and negative social comparison fostered by smartphones.
It is also a direct product of the pointlessness, fragmentation and triviality of the culture of the screen which is wholly unequipped to speak to the deep human needs for curiosity, narrative, deep attention and artistic fulfillment.
The Dawn of the Post-literate Society and the End of Civilization, by James Marriott