The Vice of Reading E-Book

Edith Wharton

• Herausgeber: ERIS
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: ERIS Gems
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 17

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

"No vices are so hard to eradicate as those which are popularly regarded as virtues. Among these the vice of reading is foremost."A great American novelist offers a scathing attack on the worst kinds of reading. Edith Wharton argues that the growing cultural influence of "mechanical" readers is having a disastrous impact on the world of letters. A subtly devastating work of social criticism, The Vice of Reading is also a celebration of the voracious and amoral consumption that marks out the very best readers.

Leseprobe

THAT “DIFFUSION OF KNOWLEDGE” commonly classed with steam-heat and universal suffrage in the category of modern improvements, has incidentally brought about the production of a new vice—the vice of reading.

No vices are so hard to eradicate as those which are popularly regarded as virtues. Among these the vice of reading is foremost. That reading trash is a vice is generally conceded; but reading per se—the habit of reading—new as it is, already ranks with such seasoned virtues as thrift, sobriety, early rising and regular exercise. There is, indeed, something peculiarly aggressive in the virtuousness of the sense-of-duty reader. By those who have kept to the humble paths of precept he is revered as following a counsel of perfection. “I wish I had kept up my reading as you have,” the unlettered novice declares to this adept in the supererogatory; and the reader, accustomed to the incense of uncritical applause, not unnaturally looks on his occupation as a noteworthy intellectual achievement.

Reading deliberately undertaken—what may be called volitional reading—is no more reading than erudition is culture. Real reading is reflex action; the born reader reads as unconsciously as he breathes; and, to carry the analogy a degree farther, reading is no more a virtue than breathing. Just in proportion as it is considered meritorious does it become unprofitable. What is reading, in the last analysis, but an interchange of thought between writer and reader? If the book enters the reader’s mind just as it left the writer’s—without any of the additions and modifications inevitably produced by contact with a new body of thought—it has been read to no purpose. In such cases, of course, the reader is not always to blame. There are books that are always the same—incapable of modifying or of being modified—but these do not count as factors in literature. The value of books is proportionate to what may be called their plasticity—their quality of being all things