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.
I thought I was going to school to be other people, but really, what I learned was to be myself - accepting myself, my strengths and weaknesses.
So much does the moral health depend upon the moral atmosphere that is breathed, and so great is the influence daily exercised by parents over their children by living a life before their eyes, that perhaps the best system of parental instruction might be summed up in these two words: 'Improve thyself.'
Examinations are formidable even to the best prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer.
Every time I wrote fiction, I was discouraged, and every time I wrote nonfiction, I was encouraged.
Everyone [in higher education] was what I call drillers of deeper wells. These academics sit at the bottom of a deep well and they look up and see a sliver of the sky. They know everything about that little sliver of sky and nothing else. I scan all my horizons.
There's no question that our children's attention and memory is changing when they are reading too long, too much, too early on digital screens.
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