And it’s Thursday!
This quotation has appeared in several places lately. It’s from Sven Birkerts’ ‘The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age’:
“To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or one’s orientation toward it.”
To what extent does this describe you?
Sort of fifty-fifty on this. I read to learn or to escape. In most cases, both…you can learn quite a bit from escaping the dreariness of a monotonous routine. I read of my own free will and it is a statement worth making. Reading does wonders for both sides of the book, the author (excited to have their work being read) and the reader (excited to be reading at all). You can be transported to mysterious places and often we do compare x y or z in the book to our own standards or points of reference–a purely human trait. Sometimes things are difficult to view in the mind’s eye, so we compare it something we can identify with. I love finding the ‘real’ equivalent of something I’ve read about in a book, it carries a distinct sense of satisfaction from bridging the gap between reality and reading.
