Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes how reading is undervalued in society despite its importance and potential impact.
Alberto Manguel's quote reflects on society's evolving perception of reading. While reading was once viewed as a crucial activity with the power to provoke thought and challenge norms, it has now been reduced to a leisurely hobby that many consider inefficient. This shift highlights a cultural devaluation of the act of engaging with literature and its potential to foster critical thinking and personal growth.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about the importance of literature in education.
The stories that unfold in the space of a writer's study, the objects chosen to watch over a desk, the books selected to sit on the shelves, all weave a web of echoes and reflections of meanings and affections, that lend a visitor the illusion that something of the owner of this space lives on between these walls, even if the owner is no more.
From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.
One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.
It has always been my experience that, whatever groupings I choose for my books, the space in which I plan to lodge them necessarily reshapes my choice and, more important, in no time proves too small for them and forces me to change my arrangement. In a library, no empty shelf remains empty for long. Like Nature, libraries abhor a vacuum, and the problem of space is inherent in the very nature of any collection of books.
My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices.
A society can exist - many do exist - without writing, but no society can exist without reading.
Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.
I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
I started studying in '85 and got knowledge of self and started spitting. What was going on was taking the understanding of what I was reading and applying it with my life and applying it with my rhymes.
Language is an art, like brewing or baking.... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.
I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.
Any decent writer writes because there's some deep internal need to keep learning.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.