Not What but How

I believe that reading is an essentially solitary activity. However, this is a fairly new perspective on the act of reading, and I'm sure that reading was not that way in the past. In fact, I know that Charles Dickens owed much of his enormous popularity, especially in his own lifetime when he was a true mega-star, to the social nature of reading in the Victorian era. Reading then was a family affair. Whether it is an overly-romanticized image or not, there is tremendous historical truth in the image of the pater familias reading aloud and directing each family member to take a turn. I suspect that Victorian readers were better readers than today's readers simply because the modus operandi of the reading act led to infinite possibilities.

But times have changed. T.V. has ruined us all. And books have become a private affair. I enjoy the privacy of reading and have no problem with the reality of the solitary reader. But I fear the prospect of solitary thinkers, and I suspect that solitary reading may lead inexorably to solitary thinking. It's not that solitary thinking is inherently bad so much as it is that solitary thinking is finite. And while I may never run out of books to read, I may very easily run out of thoughts to think. And that is a truly frightening prospect.