As I Live And Read

"Reading at Risk" is right to lament the decline of what I will forthrightly call bookishness. As the report implies, the Internet seems to have delivered a possibly knock-out punch. Our children now can scarcely use a library and instead look to the Web when they need to learn just about anything. We all just click away with mouse and remote control, speeding through a blur of links, messages, images, data of all sorts. Is this reading? As Gioia reminds us, "Print culture affords irreplaceable forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications and insights possible. To lose such intellectual capability -- and the many sorts of human continuity it allows -- would constitute a vast cultural impoverishment." So, more and more we know less and less about less and less. And we don't care. Who among the young aspires to be cultivated and learned, which takes discipline, rather than breezily provocative, wise-crackingly "edgy"?

I wish I could feel more hopeful about book culture, believe more strongly that something might be done. But we've become a shallow people, happy enough with the easy gratifications of mere spectacle in all the aspects of life. Real books are simply too serious for us. Too slow. Too hard. Too long. Now and again, we may feel that just maybe we've shortchanged our better selves, that we might have listened to great music, contemplated profoundly moving works of art, read books that mattered, but instead we turned away from them because it was time to tune into "Law and Order" reruns, or jack in to Warhammer on our home computer, or get back to the latest clone of "The Da Vinci Code." Sooner or later, though, probably late at night or when faced with one of life's crises, we will surprise in ourselves what poet Philip Larkin called the hunger to be more serious.

But come the dawn and our good intentions usually evaporate. Why persist with Plutarch or George Eliot or Beckett or William Gaddis when you can drop into a chat room or gaze at digitized lovelies or go to still another movie? Instead of reading Toqueville or Henry Adams, we just check out the latest blogs. In short, we turn toward the bright and shiny, the meretricious tinsel, the strings of eye-catching beads for which we exchange our intellectual birthright as for a mess of pottage. For modern Americans, only the unexamined life is worth living.

Okay, I exaggerate, and maybe I'm even wrong. (As Cromwell said, in one of my favorite sayings, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.") Literature, or at least storytelling, will certainly survive, gradually take on new forms. Maybe hypertext will even re-emerge as a viable literary genre. As every college freshman knows, art does need to make it new, else it shrivels to a dry husk.

Still I hate to think about how many great poems, stories and plays are slowly dropping out of our general consciousness because so few people read them anymore. It's heartbreaking. All of us -- even professional reviewers -- need to explore more widely and deeply the truly wonderful books of the past. And there are so many. How is it that I've never looked at Samuel Richardson's "Clarissa," the first great English novel, never read Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams," never explored Chinese literature at all? Who knows what pleasures and insights I have missed? Corny as it sounds, I believe that unless we try to familiarize ourselves with the best that human beings have accomplished, we will doom ourselves to be only half-formed wraiths, scarcely human beings at all.

Long ago, Thoreau said we should read the best books first, or we might never get the chance to read them. Life's days go by very quickly. Thoreau himself died at 45.

Carpe diem is thus good advice for readers as well as hedonists (not, by the way, mutually exclusive categories). This summer, do your bit for literacy: Pick up something serious you know you should have grappled with long ago. Maybe start with "Walden" -- and then keep going. As for me, I'll soon be breaking out my edition of "Clarissa" -- in eight volumes. Time is passing, after all, and I'm not getting any younger.

Author's e-mail:

dirdam@washpost.com

Michael Dirda, a longtime writer and editor for Book World, is the author, most recently, of "Bound to Please: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books," to be published in December by W.W. Norton.