The question I ask myself instead is this: in these new technological spaces, with these artefacts that will certainly coexist with (and in some cases supplant) the book—how will we succeed in still able being to invent, to remember, to learn, to record, to reject, to wonder, to exult, to subvert, to rejoice? By what means will we continue to be creative readers instead of passive viewers?
Almost ten years ago, George Steiner suggested that the anti-bookish movement will drive reading back to its birthplace and that there will be reading-houses like the old monastic libraries, where those of us quaint enough to wish to peruse an old-fashioned book will go and sit and read in silence. Something of the sort is taking place in the Monastery of the Holy Cross in Chicago’s South Side, but not in the way Steiner imagined: here the monks, after morning prayers, switch on their IBM computers and work away in their scriptorium like their ancestors a thousand years ago, copying and glossing and preserving texts for future generations. And even the privacy of devotional reading will not, apparently, retreat into secrecy; it has instead become ecumenical: God Himself can apparently be reached via the Jerusalem “Wailing Wall” Internet site for readers of the Old Testament, or via the Vatican’s Pope-site for readers of the New.
To these visions of future reading, I would like to add three more, imagined not too long ago by Ray Bradbury.
In one of the stories of The Martian Chronicles, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a fully automatized house offers, as an evening diversion, to read a poem to its inhabitants, and when it receives no response it selects and reads a poem on its own, unaware that the entire family has been annihilated in a nuclear war. This is the future of reading without readers.
Another story, “Usher II,” records the saga of a heroic devotee of Poe in an age when fiction is considered not a source for thought but something dangerously real. After Poe’s works are outlawed, this passionate reader builds a weird and dangerous house as a shrine to his hero, through which he destroys both his enemies and the books he intends to avenge. This is the future of readers without reading.
The third, the most famous, is in Fahrenheit 451, and depicts a future in which books are burned and groups of literature lovers have memorized their favourite books, carrying them around in their heads like walking libraries. This is a future in which readers and reading, in order to survive, follow Augustine’s precept and become one and the same.
Automated reading that requires no readers; the act of reading left to old-fashioned cranks who believe in books not as monsters but as places for dialogue; books transformed into a memory carried about until the mind caves in and the spirit fails … These scenarios suit the last years of our century: the end of books set against the end of time, the end of the second millennium. At the end of the first, the Adamites burnt their libraries before joining their brethren in preparation for the Apocalypse, so as not to carry useless wisdom into the promised Kingdom of Heaven.
Our fears are endemic fears, rooted in our time. They don’t branch into the unknowable future, they demand a conclusive answer, here and now. “Stupidity,” wrote Flaubert, “consists in a desire to conclude.”
Indeed. As every reader knows, the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way, the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history the act preserves. In Carpaccio’s painting, Augustine sits, as attentive as his dog, pen poised, book shining like a screen, looking straight into the light, listening. The room, the instruments keep changing, the books on the shelf shed their covers, the texts tell stories in voices not yet born.
The waiting continues.
Into the Looking-Glass Wood Page 23