Reading

Reading is a beautiful little university town in the south of England. It is also a pursuit which may bring wisdom, which offers material for reflection, which allows one to look at the thoughts of another and capture the resonances thereof. You can read music, you can read for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. One person can read another, by form, finger, face, or feeling.

And yet, we are overwhelmed with the visual image and the soundbite, day after day, dreary session after dreary session. To encourage people to read, you must sequester them; you must deny them cheap and easy recourse to the graphic, the acoustic, and the mundane. For whereas sound, action and visual image bring knowledge in their own ways, only the written word stands any chance at all of faithfully reproducing sequential, intelligent reasoning. And if this is what is required, we must read, make others read, and set up places where reading might be fruitfully accomplished.

It makes me feel rather unhappy when material which can be presented to the reading intelligence of people who presumably have the ability to read, and which is best perused carefully and referred to as necessary, is presented as quick slides and talk - especially when the slides are not optimised for knowledge transfer and when the talk is much the same in quality. One ought at least to get a performance equal to the combined power of the text and the intelligent re-enactment of it from the reader's mind. But one doesn't. And it galls. It galls in all three parts, as another Caesar might have said.