BOOKS, BOOKS, AND MORE BOOKS
Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books, translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer (London: Sort of Books, 2004).
The reading of books is growing arithmetically; the writing of books is growing exponentially. If our passion for writing goes unchecked, in the near future there will be more people writing books than reading them.
Id. at 9.
The inertness of the printed word is not a failing of print but a failing of life. There is much dead text in conversation, in the university, in sermons, in speeches, in the words and acts of everyday life. Just consider a medieval scenario that persists to this day: In the classroom, the teacher reads his lectures, and the students take notes. What is the role of the teacher here? Not the Socratic role of the spiritual midwife who guides the intelligence of his interlocutor into the world, but the phonographic role of a needle tracing the written word. Today, when an excess of population, an excess of academicism, and the excessive cost of personal attention make it impossible to have a Socratics in every classroom, at what level is the classroom not an obsolete machine in comparison to other forms of teaching and inspiration, like the library?
Id. at 39-40.
Those who do read books because they were lucky enough to have had parents or teachers or friends who were readers, those few, even, who read a book a day with the unfettered voracity that later tends to embarrass them--not realizing that this very habit has taught them to read, since it is reading at such a pace that teaches the reader to see the whole at a glance--are so few and far between that average book reading is low, even in developed countries. Reading is not the act of spelling out words, or the effort of dragging oneself across the surface of a mural that will never be viewed in its entirety. Beyond the alphabet, the paragraph, and the short article which may still be taken in all at once, these are functional illiteracies of the book. The great barrier to the free circulation of books is the mass of privileged citizens who have university degrees but have never learned to read properly.
Statistics published by UNESCO make it evident that the explosion in the number of books published in the twentieth century parallels the proliferation of academic degrees, But the explosion say more about the supply than demand. University graduates are more interested in publishing books than reading them.
Publishing is a standard part of establishing an academic or bureaucratic career. It is like writing the necessary reports or properly filing out the forms required to enter a competition. It has nothing to do with reading or writing. Reading is difficult, it takes time away form the pursuit of a career, and it doesn't gain anyone points except in the lists of works cited. Publishing is a means to an end. Reading is useless: it is a vice, pure pleasure.
Id. at 73-74.
