The Wild Girls by Ursula K. Le Guin Read Free Book Online Page B

decline of reading on TV, movies, and the Internet. Understandably. We all know that the Average Adult American spends from sixteen to twenty-eight hours a day watching TV (my margin of error there may be a little broad) and the rest of the time ordering stuff from eBay and blogging.
    That we read so little appears to be newsworthy, even shocking, yet the tone of the article is almost congratulatory. The AP story quotes a project manager for a telecommunications company in Dallas: “I just get sleepy when I read,” adding, “a habit with which millions of Americans doubtless can identify.” Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with printed matter seems misplaced. But I think the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly jubilant—of the imminent disappearance of reading is misplaced too.
    The thing is, not very many people ever did read much. Why should we think they do, or ought to, now?
    For a long, long time most people couldn’t read at all. Literacy was not encouraged among the lower classes, laymen, or women. It was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless, it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue. The ability to maintain and understand commercial records, the ability to communicate across distance and in code, the ability to keep the word of God to yourself and transmit it only at your own will and in your own time—these are formidable means of control over others and aggrandizement of self. Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative of the ruling class.
    Only gradually, if at all, did writing-and-reading filter downward, becoming less sacred as it became less secret, and less directly potent as it became more popular. The Chinese Empire kept it as an effective tool of governmental control, basing advancement in the bureaucratic hierarchy strictly on a series of literary tests. The Romans, far less systematic, ended up letting slaves, women, and such rabble read and write; but they got their comeuppance from the religion-based society that succeeded them. In the Dark Ages, to be a Christian priest usually meant you could read at least a little, but to be a layman meant you probably didn’t, and to be almost any kind of woman meant you couldn’t. Not only didn’t, but couldn’t—weren’t allowed to. As in some Muslim societies today.
    In the West, one can see the Middle Ages as a kind of slow broadening of the light of the written word, which brightens into the Renaissance, and shines out with Gutenberg. Then, before you know it, women slaves are reading and writing, and revolutions are made with pieces of paper called Declarations of this and that, and schoolmarms replace gunslingers all across the Wild West, and people are mobbing the steamer bringing the latest installment of a new novel to New York, crying, “Is Little Nell dead? Is she dead?”
    I have no statistics to support what I am about to say (and if I did I wouldn’t trust their margin of error) but it appears to me that the high point of reading in the United States was from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, with a kind of peak in the early twentieth. I think of the period as the century of the book. From around the 1850’s on, as the public school came to be considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and flourished, financed by local businessmen and multimillionaires, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common. And the central part of the curriculum from first grade on was “English,” not only because immigrants wanted their children fluent in it, but because literature—fiction, scientific works, history, poetry—was a major form of social currency.
    It’s interesting, even a little scary, to look at old textbooks, schoolbooks from the 1890’s, 1900, 1910, like the McGuffey’s Readers of which a couple of battered copies still lay around the house when I was a child, or the
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