Delight Springs

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Reading

Everyone Likes Reading. Why Are We So Afraid of It? Book bans, chatbots, pedagogical warfare: What it means to read has become a minefield. --A.O. Scott https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/books/review/book-bans-humanities-ai.html?smid=em-share

Interesting. But Carl Sagan had deeper insight into the transformative time-traveling power ("magic") of reading:

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." [Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]

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