Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing chastens nonreaders, Take Note!

Author's note: I'm hopeful the content of this blog comports with Ms. Lessing's standards indicated below. Nevertheless, we all need to act in tempered ways once we walk through the URL gateway if we are to reemerge productive members of our respective cultures.

The British writer Doris Lessing casts a cold, sad eye on those nations whose "educated" classes no longer read. Below, an excerpt from the speech Doris Lessing wrote on accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007:

"What has happened to us is an amazing invention -- computers and the Internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked, What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print? In the same way, we never thought to ask, How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by this Internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc.

Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and our great store of literature. Of course, we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the founding of working men's libraries and institutes, the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education.

Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less. And if children cannot read, it is because they have not read.

...The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us--for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative."

Be a reader. On occasion, experience a story through the lens of your mind instead of the dictatorial lens of the camera. Not that all is lost on the Big Screen. Recently found through email, a comment on Daniel Day Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood, based upon the Upton Sinclair novel, Big Oil, which you are encouraged to read after experiencing the movie.

"Last night, after experiencing the movie There Will Be Blood, I had the distinct feeling, still do, that Daniel Day-Lewis' bravura performance may not be outdone in my lifetime. That’s saying a lot, I realize, but it may come true. Two forces came together to make it happen, Day-Lewis’ rare abilities linked with cultivated discipline, and writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson's savvy in staging an opportunity for the powerful actor to gather the momentum necessary for rendering a herculean performance. Here, I speak of both script, (even though flawed) and a set "to play in" (to paraphrase Day-Lewis). Give Anderson credit also for drawing upon Upton Sinclair’s novel Big Oil for inspiration. Paul Dano was accomplished in his work, providing a helpful counterpoint for Lewis to complete his masterful interpretation of the Daniel Plainview character."