Eating be damned – you are what you read. Chances are, you spend more time doing the latter than the former (or at least you should: basic physical and mental health demands it) and, although the sustained intake of food may be more conducive to longevity, the sustained intake of words is more conducive to personal growth and happiness. And what good is a long life without these ingredients?
For many of us, our daily reading material is almost exclusively made up of the emails we send and receive. Our literary endeavours begin with: “Please find attached” or “Following from our meeting last Thursday”. They end with: “Looking forward to hearing from you in due course” or “Please do not hesitate to contact me for anything further”. Beyond this, we swallow information whole –140 characters or less permits this – accessing and dismissing the words we read with the flick of a finger across our touch screens.
This massive influx of bite-sized words leaves us depleted come the end of days. We retreat from the literary. The television, the “download here” button: what freedom, what disengaged bliss. Oh, if someone were to write an ode to the vegetative state, we would surely read that – unless there was a meme. Yes, that would be better.
Words have become conduits of information (which sounds like just about the most axiomatic thing ever written). The great pity is that they have become little more. The pleasure of reading for reading’s sake is ebbing. The pleasure of reading for the sake of satiating one’s thirst for knowledge, obtaining some mental tickle or satisfying a soulful yearning – in the business world, at least – is all but lost.
I recently spent three months on a secondment to the government, and commuted for three hours each day to Pretoria via car, train, bus and on foot. On day one, I instinctively packed a book. On day four, I packed a second. By the beginning of my second week, I had rediscovered the joyful convenience of my Kindle. By the end of the first month, my bookshelves, both virtual and literal, were newly stocked.
We were in the minority, us train-readers. Our fellow travellers were primarily made up of sleepers (fair enough, my train left shortly after 6am) and music-listeners (no discredit to music intended, another necessary form of storytelling). But the readers in my carriage were few: the elderly man, a fresh copy of The Economist under his arm each week; the young schoolgirl, blue ribbons interwoven in her shoelaces, thumbing through a series of dog-eared, brightly covered teen romances; the professional in an over-sized suit, painstakingly making his way, day after day, through a biography on Fidel Castro; and me, rediscovering the literature that for years was my oxygen. I just didn’t realise how little I’ve been breathing of late.
I devoured The Luminaries, that Booker Prize-winning tome written by a 28-year-old I find difficult not to envy. I read the first novel of the incredible Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the only work of hers I have neglected despite my love of everything else she has penned. With trepidation, I immersed myself in JM Coetzee’s latest, which, like the rest of his work, managed to baffle and amaze in equal measure. NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names made me ache.
The mind is capable of more. It is not limited to emails. Despite what 21st-century living dictates, we still have the capacity to absorb and be inspired by something expertly and beautifully articulated.
And if we are what we read, I’d rather be a novel than a tweet.