It will come as no surprise to almost anyone who has known me, even briefly, that I belong to a vast and welcoming community: The Community of Readers. This is a group of people whose interests, unfettered by the mere conventions of time and space, range wildly. One of the ways that I expand inside this community is to spend part of every day engaging with fellow members. I cannot escape reading. As Scout Finch says in To Kill a Mockingbird, “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” The implications of this quote are many, not the least of which is that being denied the freedom to read makes the act of reading all that more precious. Additionally the act of reading, for Scout, and for me, is as vital as breathing. I confess, I take it for granted. It is only when eye fatigue, after a long afternoon at the computer threatens to completely compromise my acuity, that I ponder, with a certain measure of horror, what my life would be were I unable to read.
I guess there would be audiobooks, the pacing controlled by another, to console me in my blindness, and perhaps I could manage with that substitute, but then I recall an experience my son recounted. He had listened to Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, on his way home from college, and said that now he would have to read it himself to find his own voice with the same words. He felt that someone else had shaped his perception of the novel through the power of reading aloud. “I’m wondering what it’ll sound like in my head when I read it, ” he said. Ah, the uniquely personal power of reading!
This community of readers to which I belong allows anyone to join, and hopefully the reading leads to the thinking that makes our shared humanity more precious–that engenders a world order more accepting, less judgmental.