How Reading Changed My Life Read Free Page A

infinitely more complex, and stranger, too, as though millions of us had felt the need, over the span of centuries, to place messages in bottles, to ameliorate the isolation of each of us, each of us a kind of desert island made less lonely by words. Or, not simply by words, but by words without the evanescence of speech, words that would always be the same, only the reader differenteach time, so that today, or next year, or a hundred years from now, someone could pick up
A Tale of Two Cities
, turn to the last page, and see that same final sentence, that coda that Dickens first offered readers in 1859: “It is a far, far better thing …”
    The Sumerians first used the written word to make laundry lists, to keep track of cows and slaves and household goods. But even in such primitive form, the writing down of symbols told of something hugely and richly revolutionary: the notion that one person could have a thought, even if that thought was only about the size of his flocks, and that that thought could be retained and then accessed—rethought, really—by another person in another place and time. The miraculous and transformative quality of this was immediately apparent to some and denied by others: Aristotle turned Alexander the Great into a great reader and champion of books, which led Alexander’s successor, Ptolemy I, to create the world’s first great library in Alexandria. But Socrates thought books were a waste of time, since they could only “remind one of what one already knows.”
    Perhaps, seeing his disdain rekindled on the printed page 2500 years after he first felt it—and understanding, surely, that some readers, reading his words, were indeed learning something about Socratesthat they had never known before—the great thinker would change his mind. The clay tablet gave way to the scroll and then to the codex, the folded sheets that prefigured the book we hold and sell and treasure today. Wealthy households had books of prayers hand lettered and illuminated by monks; great soldiers kept their dispatches on paper. The French and English modified Gutenberg’s press and then mechanized it to set down religious texts and the books of the Bible. Martin Luther nailed his written manifesto against the excesses of the Catholic hierarchy to the door of a church in Wittenberg and began a war of words that led to the Reformation and, eventually, to Protestantism; the Declaration of Independence was set in type and fomented, in relatively few words, a new way for men and women to look at their own government.
    And soon publishers had the means, and the will, to publish anything—cookbooks, broadsides, newspapers, novels, poetry, pornography, picture books for children—and to publish them in a form that many people could afford and most could find at the library. Reading became a democratic act, making it possible for the many to teach themselves what the few had once learned from tutors. The president could quote Mark Twain because he had read
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, and the postman could understandthe reference because he had read it, too. The Big Lies of demagoguery required more stealth and cleverness, for careful reading of books and newspapers could reveal their flaws to ordinary people. Not for nothing did the Nazis light up the night skies in their cities with the burning of books. Not for nothing were free white folks in America prohibited from teaching slaves to read, and slaves in South Carolina threatened with the loss of the first joint of their forefingers if they were caught looking at a book; books became the greatest purveyors of truth, and the truth shall make you free.
    But there was much more than freedom. Reading became the pathway to the world, a world without geographic boundaries or even the steep risers of time. There was a time machine in our world, but not the contraption of metal and bolts and motors imagined even by a man as imaginative as H. G. Wells. Socrates was