Books have always been part of the warp and woof of my life’s fabric. Since boyhood, my various bedrooms have been shared with a well-stocked bookshelf, every nightstand with at least one volume sitting atop it.
My literary tastes have changed throughout the years, largely dependent upon my age and interests at the time. While I cannot remember the first book I was given, I do remember, as a 3- or 4-year-old, going to the mailbox with my mother to get the latest offering from the Sesame Street Book Club. Titles like Ernie’s Neighborhood, Early Bird On Sesame Street, and Elmo’s Alphabet not only connected me to the puppet characters I saw on T.V.; they were my first taste of a world—an imaginary world, to be sure—outside of the confines of my Kelly Road universe. The long summers of my early boyhood were also dotted with regular visits to Rawson Memorial Library. There, I borrowed Bernard Waber’s Ira Sleeps Over repeatedly. Incidentally, I bought that very book from the library book sale several years ago, and I read it to my own children today. In elementary school, my teachers placed a high premium on reading aloud to their students. I especially relished the time, right after lunch recess, when my teachers read to the class from such books as Flint native Christopher Paul Curtis’ Bud, Not Buddy, Andrew Clements’ Frindle, or my personal favorite The Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. Entering middle school and moving to a larger school building opened a new world to me, primarily because it meant a new library. Mrs. Brown ensured the shelves there were filled with volumes that would interest young people. I can still see one particular shelf, filled-to-overflowing with blue, hard backed copies of The Hardy Boy novels. My friends and I devoured that series. In high school, my teenage journey of “finding myself” took place largely in the biography section of the school library. The life stories of men and women like Ronald Regan, Richard Nixon, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Condoleezza Rice helped me to develop an idea both of the kind of person I wanted to be and the kind of person I never wanted to become. When I was in my mid-twenties, a mutual friend introduced me to Dr. Rosalie De Rosset, who, for more than half a century, taught Literature, English and Homiletics at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Dr. De Rosset compiled a marvelous list of book recommendations, many of them classics, that helped me to broaden my literary appetite and to read books that dealt with timeless themes and struggles inherent to the human experience. Among these classics was Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. When I first read it, one scene in particular stood out to me. In it, Scout, Lee’s young protagonist, goes to school for the first time. Upon learning that Scout had already learned to read, the teacher reprimands her. Assuming Atticus, Scout’s lawyer father, is the one responsible for teaching Scout, the teacher tells Scout not to allow him to teach her any longer. After all, he does not know the proper methods. The idea that she might be compelled to stop reading alarms the young girl and causes her to cling even more tightly to her books. “Until I feared I would lose it,” she says, “I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” Living in a land where books are both plentiful and relatively inexpensive, I have never feared that reading would be taken from me by force. But, like all freedoms, outside coercion is only one means of loss. More likely is that we give them up in the pursuit of immediate charms. I experienced this a few weeks ago. After putting the children to bed, I sat in my living room watching a series of videos on YouTube. It was then that I realized that scrolling social media and watching clips online had, almost imperceptibly, become a habit. Most alarming of all was the realization that I had allowed my screen time to replace my reading time. Instead of participating with an author on a journey through another time or place, I was simply consuming the creative content (creative being a generous stretch) of others. To be sure, no one had taken my books from my hands. It was all my own doing. But the effect was the same as if someone had actually banned me from reading, and I was poorer for it. In my walk with the Lord, I have come to realize that the best time to repent of sin is the moment I am aware of it. So, too, in scenarios where I have allowed the good to displace the best. Right then and there, I decided to put the phone down and to pick up a book. What did I feel? Rebellion, mostly. I chose, in that moment, to actually live, to engage in a world of ideas and knowledge and imagination, instead of allowing unknown others to entertain me. In a time when the easiest thing to do is to merely consume, to stare passively at a black rectangle for hours on end, it felt and feels revolutionary. Do not get me wrong; I value technology and champion its responsible use. In fact, I use an app on my phone to log my reading progress and to keep track of the books I hope to read. But what a feeling it is to cut the invisible tether that binds so many of us to the ease of passivity and thoughtlessness in order to drop anchor in an ocean of ideas and other worlds! Like Scout, I had a brush with literary suffocation. And like her, I found it to be an experience that caused me to gasp for the life-giving air of the printed page.
1 Comment
Jane A Pierpont
7/27/2023 05:15:03 pm
Truth - but so glad j stumbled across this as I surf instead of watching TV.
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AuthorTy Perry is a writer based in metro-Detroit. Archives
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