On Reading

I am informed that there is now a reading community, which is a phrase so dispiriting that I required several minutes and a strong cup of tea before I could bring myself to continue.

Reading is not a community. It is not a hobby, nor a lifestyle, nor an identity to be proclaimed on the same devices that have done so much to render it unnecessary. It is literacy, practiced. It is the baseline requirement of a mind that intends to remain in working order, and the fact that it has been reduced to a special interest, complete with its own vocabulary of enthusiasm and belonging, tells you everything you need to know about the distance your era has travelled from the one in which I was trained.

In the first decade of this century, which is to say the century before yours, the great project of the age was the expansion of literacy to every man, woman, and child in the kingdom. Public libraries were being built at a pace that reflected genuine civic ambition. The Education Acts had made schooling compulsory, and the understanding, shared across political divisions that agreed upon almost nothing else, was that a literate population was the foundation upon which everything else would be constructed: industry, governance, moral reasoning, the capacity for self-improvement. Reading was not a pastime. It was the mechanism by which a person became capable of independent thought, and its absence was understood, correctly, as a form of captivity.

That men of your era, who have access to more written material than any generation in the history of the species, read less than their grandfathers did is not merely a failure of habit. It is a squandering of inheritance so vast that it borders on the obscene. Your grandfathers, many of them, fought for the right to be educated. They walked miles to borrow a single book from a lending library. They read by candlelight because the alternative was ignorance, and ignorance, in their experience, was not the gentle fog your era has made of it but a cage with economic locks.

A gentleman reads. This is not a suggestion calibrated to your interest or your schedule; it is a statement of minimum qualification, beneath which the word gentleman ceases to apply. He reads because a man who does not read is a man who takes the world on trust, accepting what he is told without the means to evaluate it, forming opinions from the opinions of others, and mistaking repetition for truth. He reads because it is the only reliable method of encountering ideas that are not already his own, and a mind that encounters only its own ideas is not thinking but merely revolving.

What you read matters less than that you read. A novel will do; a history will do; a biography, an essay, a volume of letters from a period not your own. What will not do is the consumption of fragments, the scrolling through headlines and summaries and the opinions of strangers delivered in sentences too short to contain a thought worth having. This is not reading. It is the sensation of reading, emptied of its substance, and the mind that subsists upon it will come to resemble, over time, the material it consumes: shallow, reactive, confident without cause, and unable to sustain attention across a paragraph of any length.

Read for thirty minutes a day. Not on a screen, if you can help it, for the screen invites interruption and the book does not. Thirty minutes is modest by any standard, and yet I suspect that many of you will find even this difficult at first, not because you lack the time but because you have trained your attention, through years of voluntary fragmentation, to resist the sustained focus that reading requires. Persist. The difficulty is temporary. The capacity returns, and with it a quality of thought that no amount of scrolling will ever provide.

I do not say this with contempt, though I confess the temptation is considerable. I say it because I watched a civilisation build libraries with the same seriousness with which it built railways, understanding that both were infrastructure, and that the former served a purpose at least as essential as the latter. Those libraries still stand. The books are still in them. The only thing that has changed is the willingness of men to walk through the door.

You have inherited more than you deserve. The least you can do is read it.