Ursula’s Plea

The current issue of Harper’s Magazine (Feb 2008) features an article by Ursula Le Guin called “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading.” What we read here is right in line with what we explored earlier with C.S. Lewis’ comments about ‘receiving’ a book rather than ‘using’ it. Le Guin’s contention is that it’s no surprise not everyone is up to reading:

“In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart into it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact.”

Entering into a story on its own terms. Imagine. Giving a story your mind—more, your heart. A two-way set of expectations. Not just readers with their requirements, but stories looking for good readers. Readers who honor the covenant between author and audience. Le Guin continues, “Reading is not ‘interactive’ with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind.”

This is as far away from our snippet-searching, give-me-a-verse-for-today typical Bible ‘use’ (one can’t really call it reading) as it could be.

Ursula Le Guin, advocate for mo’ betta reading.

-Glenn