Nobody Reads Anymore

A Treatise, a Challenge

At least not the way we used to. Not far past the headline. At most, we get through the first few lines. After that, your guess is as good as mine as to when a person stops reading and starts scrolling.

Photo by kychan on Unsplash

It’s a rare feat these days to get past the second paragraph. There’s too much to distract. By now, there are other voices vying for your attention. Not pieces of writing, per se—just content. Celebrity scandal carousels and ads for supplements keeping Hollywood’s elites looking younger than ever. And you’ll never guess who he’s with now or what she looks like at sixty.

So you scroll.

And you click.

And as you gobble up more headlines declaring the end of the world—or the salvation of it—your eyes begin to glaze over. The mind starts to calcify, hardening at the edges, making it impenetrable to what wants to crack it open.

Listen to this. Swipe that. And you, too, can discover the top five foods giving you cancer. Hover over this way and you’ll learn what famous cities are going to be underwater in the next fifty years. It’s all so much to take in, and there is only more every second.

Yet we “read” on, caught up in the current, ceaselessly trudging into a future we cannot keep up with. What else are we to do? Sit there like some shark refusing to swim?

We must keep scrolling, must keep clicking and refreshing our browsers in service of that great industriousness which moves our world forward. What does it profit a man, after all, to gain the whole world and not be constantly overwhelmed by it?

What does it profit a man to gain the whole world
and not be constantly overwhelmed by it?

And who, for that matter, has time to read, what with dance practice and never-ending errands, backyard barbecues and clients with access to us even at dinnertime? When and where could a person fit in something so banal as reading? How plain, how pedestrian, how very twentieth century of you.

Tell me, please. Because I am eager to know: when was the last time you picked up a book or a magazine, maybe even just a pamphlet, and read for the pleasure of the experience, the pure enjoyment of the act: eyes touching text, paragraphs becoming symphonies, fingers rubbing deckled edges, the smoothness of ink beneath your thumbs, your face so close to the pages that you could smell their bread-like warmth? When were you last transported to another world, one like this one but deep within yourself?

Perhaps, it has been a while. And if so, I wonder why. Maybe no one ever told you the good that can come from understanding one true thing instead of trying to learn a hundred half-things. You can drown in a sea of information if you aren’t careful.

But there is joy under the apple blossom tree, the one already blooming; and as you slump down against it on this sixty-five-degree day, the warmth of spring forcing your sweater to the ground, you can pick up that paperback copy of Gatsby collecting dust on the shelf. And read. Without plan or great intention, you can just read.

You don’t have to finish the thing. Don’t have to get too far at all. Don’t even have to reach the end of a chapter. You can just let the letter combinations wash over you like rainwater, abating your anxiety before your next Zoom meeting.

And you can be here in this moment, right now, the one begging to take you down the Mississippi or carry you off to Mars. You can marvel at how another people in another time behaved. You can consider what someone in China thinks about the ethics of organ transplants, and you can track the mating habits of Andean condors in South America.

You can participate in this ritual, this elixir of the gods, letting your eyes imbibe that which few before you have been fortunate enough to taste. You can relish this opportunity, this privilege, this gift of literacy. Here, there is no next, only this: words yearning to be held by a mind—desperate for acknowledgment, jealous to be noticed.

All of creation is awaiting your attention now, crying out for it, ready to burst forth with possibility. All you have to do is pick up a book and begin.

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What are you reading right now?