16
IJARTISAN REVIEW
he meant and what I think reading shou ld be, and it's not how we teach
it. He says-and I have to say the prose is a bit cluttered, but I don't think
that can be Goethe's fault: "Hence it is everyone's duty to inquire into
what is internal and peculiar in a book which particularly interests us, and
at the same time above all things, to weigh in what relation it stands to our
own inner nature and how far by that vitality our own is excited and made
fruitful. On the other hand, everything that is external, that is ineffective
with respect to ourselves, or subject to a doubt, is to be consigned over to
criticism, which, even if it shou ld be able to dislocate and dismember the
whole, would never succeed in depriving us of the on ly ground to which
we hold fast, nor even perplexing us for a mOl1lent with respect to our
once formed confidence." I need to repeat that phrase, "What is internal
and peculiar in a book wh ich interests us and at the same time above all
things to weigh in what relation it stands to our own inner nature and how
far by that vitality our own is excited and l1lade fi·uitful." Now that seems
to me what reading should be and what shou ld be taught to children. What
Goethe meant was that you should not bring your own agendas to a book.
You shou ld not be looking for your poli tical l1lessages, your own ideas. On
the contrary, you shou ld be rather passive. You shou ld allow no barrier
between yourself and what the author is saying.
It
should be a kind of
transparency. N ow this in fact is rather hard to achieve because our minds
are always full of some agenda or other, and it's very hard not to put that
into the book. "Well he should be doing that, he shou ldn 't be doing that,
she oughtn't to be doing that. .." There is a book cal led
A History of
Readillg,
by Alberto Manguel, which is brilliant.
It
ought to be in the hands
of young people, because it will tell them just how valuable reading has
been, how it has been valued in a way that they do not because they haven't
been taught to.
It
is my personal view that our minds have been damaged.
I'm
being serious. I think we might have damaged minds. That is why we
are getting stupider and stupider. It's not ill wi ll or television only. My own
attention span is much shorter, and this is not old age, either.
I want to brieny touch on something else that is very much related. I
have been describing the situation in developed countries, in our kind of
society, but there is a very big world out there, the Third World, which
does not
have
our "advantages." I was in a school in North London talk–
ing to some very privileged young men. They had people like myself every
week, and I stood there looking at these faces and I knew they were think–
ing, "0 God," (because they had to, this was compu lsory) "we've got to sit
through this," so I started to describe to them what I had seen two days
before. I had been in a very desolate place in Northeast Zimbabwe, then
Rhodesia, at a school which consisted of some barracks stuck in the sand.
They had practically no books, textbooks, not even an atlas.
It
goes wi th-
