There’s a pet theory of mine that says if you’re nine years old, having reached the third year of elementary school, and you don’t love to read and have at least some middling skills at it, your life is going to be from that point forward much simpler, much less colorful, and to no small degree, much more difficult. Maybe it’s because I started reading at four, and by the time I was in first grade I was reading at a 6th grade level (apparently, the point on the yardstick at least 50% of Americans find themselves).
It doesn’t matter what you read, actually. Comic books, fairy tales, road signs, cereal boxes, adaptations for young people, television subtitles. Reading IS fundamental. Not only because it increases the scope by which you view and interpret the world, and the infinite names by which you can label at endless variety of phenomenon and objects, but because it exposes you, even if only by osmosis or accidental seepage, to ideas. And ideas, particularly those you formulate inside your own mind based on your personal experience, are powerful and sometimes magical things.
Seeking out opportunities to read is critical to the development of one of the most important qualities of humanity: curiosity. There is a sadness, and even a danger, to creatures who possess no sense of wonder at how things are the way they are – and a desire to find out why. In animals, that lack of a why gene typically makes for very dull and short lives. A mouse in a maze with no sense of fuck around and find out will very rarely get the cheese, and more often than not, by not noticing and keeping track of the warning signs along the path, is likely to find the cat instead. Yes, you may get a chunk of old bread, or in the case of a butterfly, a really unappetizing bit of pollen, but unless you’re interested in experimenting at least a little, your unexamined life is pretty pointless.
In humans, a lack of curiosity is even more dangerous. If you can imagine yourself as a being that never, ever in any circumstances, asks for more information, for clarity, for some underlying principle or justification – well, if you CAN imagine that, you’ve probably got a little curiosity. Thank goodness. But you know people without curiosity, certainly. They are dry, flat, and unprofitable, for the most part. They may do well in school, where the actuarial tendencies of mediocrity are so capably reinforced and encouraged. They will rise, it is said, to the highest level of their incompetence – and stay forever stuck in an amber life which might as well be heavily medicated, for there are no real highs or lows. That’s survival, not living, isn’t it? Churning out widgets and children who will count widgets for another few ages. Maneuvering through one set of boxes after another, opening the door of one prison cell to only find yourself in a series of ever larger, ever more comfortable ones, but never really getting a window to what’s beyond the gates.
Imagine being a writer in such a world. John Waters once quipped that if you go home with someone and find out they don’t have any books in their home, don’t have sex with them. But somehow or another they keep breeding, don’t they, these non-curious, non-reading, non-essential, and ultimately, non-entity things that pass themselves off as human beings. Don’t get me wrong – they’re not monsters, most of them. Being a monster, or at least an interesting villain, requires imagination and curiosity.
There are a lot of reasons to write. Most of them involve communicating, entertaining, educating, or enlightening, to some degree and in some combination or another. All of it, ultimately, is about inspiring the reader to continue on their way, using what you’ve written as a guidepost, touchstone, fuel, or fodder. Human beings are consumers. They ingest to live. How that life turns out depends a lot on the quality of the intake. In more ways than one, garbage in leads to garbage out. Sometimes that refuse makes for great fertilizer. Other times, not so much.
The reasons for reading are likewise myriad. But if at least one of them isn’t because simply expanding your world of ideas is a personal imperative, then you’re really missing out. Reading is fundamental.
14 APR 2025
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