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non-techy
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Perfect combination of ancient and modern reading?
I admit it - I am ambivalent about the wisdom of reading as a past time. Especially as a past time - that very concept.I am reminded of a western monk, a Tibetan Buddhist monk I used to chat with sometimes on the street. We were talking about the habit of reading. He suggested that people read out of a neurosis, a nervous wish to busy their minds with useless information, ideas and mental images because they are afraid of the content of their own minds. 'Well, that's why I read", was my immediate reaction.
Anyway, aside from that philosophical consideration of reading, I am contemplating the social usefulness of reading. According to what I see on the 'idiot box' (grampa's word for television), on one of the few stations with anything edifying, Knowledge Network's 'Empire of the Word', private silent reading is a relatively new phenomena - 14th or 15th century if my memory serves me correctly. I used to tell my ESL students that reading with lips reading is taken to be the sign of a moron, but this is actually the way we read for centuries. According to my own (oops) reading, History of Private Life, a very tedious tome written by French scholars (their writing style or that of the translators drives me crazy), it wasn't until the later 17th century that people read books alone. So, to my real point... I am captivating by the idea of combining social reading and technical advances, viz. group reading from an ereader. Small groups of 4-8 sitting under a tree listening to someone, the most literate of them, reading aloud some classic like Man of LaMancha. Last edited by hermes; 06-14-2011 at 02:14 AM. Reason: spelling, left one incorrect as doing so would screw up thread |
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frumious Bandersnatch
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For most of human history few people knew how to read. Most people were busy trying to survive and didn't have the time to learn and besides that writing materials were expensive. Even in the 19th century children used the slate for most writing practice because paper was so precious. And of course people relied on memory including rhymes such as "Thirty days hath September.." to remember things. Storytelling was something done on cold winter nights when there wasn't much else that could be done, and of course the wandering storyteller also served as a source of news about what was going on in the outer world. Monks were some of the few people who could read (and even some monks were illiterate). There is a story of a book that some monks used as kindling for their cook fire. It turned out to be a copy of the scriptures they were burning, but since they couldn't read they didn't know that til most of the copy had been used. Probably one reason people didn't read books alone for so long was that few people in the group could read.
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Apart from the other issues raised in this post I do wonder if private reading is indeed such a "recent" phenomenon. I seem to recall that wealthy Romans did have private studies in ancient times and so did to my knowledge the ancient Chinese. It is no surprise that in Europe private reading started at the time when books became affordable thanks to book printing.
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#7 |
Maratus speciosus butt
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Hey, 48 bucks for the hard cover, 20 bucks for the paperback, but only $1.99 for the ebook!
http://www.amazon.com/Why-Read-Ficti.../dp/081425151X |
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Banned
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I can easily imagine a group of people sitting under a tree with ereaders all being streamed a video feed of the author reading.
"The word is a virus" The thoughts of one mind intertwining with another. |
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Kate
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What CommonReader said. Of course people couldn't read alone if they didn't have books. My response to the OP's pretentious monk friend would have been, 'Whatcha smokin', dude?' I never heard such nonsense. |
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![]() Last edited by DiapDealer; 06-12-2011 at 11:30 AM. |
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IOC Chief Archivist
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![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Sorry, but that sounds like a load of pretentious crap to me. I'm not even sure how the first and second paragraph lead to the "point" of your post there at the end. (While I do believe reading is socially useful, I don't necessarily see tree-shaded reading groups as the epitome of usefulness.) |
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