Put Down the Phone and Pull Out a Book

Wall Street Journal

5 days ago

Writers of horror and dystopian fiction often build tension by adding small tokens of dreadful approach to placid, ordinary circumstances. Everything seems fine, even as the characters glimpse the odd creepy thing. Only belatedly do those in the gathering drama realize they're in the midst of something monstrous.
The same can be said of a culture in which reading is increasingly alien. Everything ticks along: Publishers still print books, libraries and bookstores still stock them, and some adults and children still read for pleasure. But we are surrounded by intimations of coming dystopia.
College English majors are losing the ability to interpret metaphorical language, as evidenced by the recent disclosure that only 5% of English majors at two midwestern schools could make sense of paragraphs from 'Bleak House' by Charles Dickens. High school students taking the SAT are no longer expected to understand passages longer than 150 words. Activist schoolteachers for a decade have sidelined classic works of literature deliberately to rob them of readers and relevance. Young parents increasingly can't be bothered to read aloud to their children.
These are darkening days for those of us who love books. But we needn't drift apathetically into a horror story. The English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote of beauty that it is 'vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn't matter.' Well, that's true of reading. It is vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn't matter. We are on our phones.