THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607150187
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: 75 lines
Something Besides Books, Part One:
The experiment was to stop reading for an entire week.
At least, all recreational reading. Road signs were OK, instructions, menus. Even headlines.
Those are road signs, too.
But no more editorial page over morning coffee, no more Time magazine with Nabs at noon, no more bedside mystery novels at night. No reading to the kids, no browsing in the libraries, no surfing for informational factoids on the Internet.
No brochures.
No comic books.
No books, period.
Other folks had met the challenge of turning off the television for a time. Some gave up fried food. Some even stopped smoking.
So easy.
But stop reading?
Books are the essential backboards off which one bounces ideas. I might as well hold my breath for a week. No close encounters of the nerd kind?
I'd been emphasizing the necessity for reading for so long that just entertaining the notion of stopping was tantamount to Bob Dole endorsing anarchy.
``You're grumpy already,'' my wife Lynn said the first day.
HA!
What did she know? She still had half her head. And I was feeling JUST FINE, thank you very much.
It wasn't as if I could ignore them. There were books in every room of the house, books in the office, books in the glove compartment of the car (well, you never know). I got them in the mail.
Friends loaned them to me.
Jack Kerouac Rex Stout John Updike Anne Tyler Charles Bukowski Joyce Carol Oates Maxwell Grant.
William
F.
Buckley
Jr.
They said: READ ME.
I said: Who needs it? I can do this. Pfui.
In fact, it turned out to be no big deal.
Just kidding!
By the third day, my wife was no longer ruling out divorce. I found myself dreaming about Weird Tales, Amazing Stories and other lurid pulps of the '30s. I even found myself starting to crave Henry James.
Definitely a bad sign.
``Reading maketh a full man,'' Sir Francis Bacon said.
Who asked him?
``There is no frigate like a book,'' Emily Dickinson said.
So swim, sister.
James Russell Lowell offered this: ``It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.''
Thanks for that, Jim.
Still, he is at least partly right. We fill the air - in cars, elevators and even stores - with sounds designed to absolve us of thought. And TV has become the modern tribal fire.
But it seems to me that books don't so much pad the present moment as animate the future. They are nutrition for the mind, and we are what we eat. They exercise the brain the way weights and bars exercise the body.
Isn't it possible to suppose that if we don't vary the input, our unchallenged presuppositions might run to fat?
Toward the end, Lynn caught me turning the pages of a book catalog.
``You're reading,'' she accused.
``Nothing of the kind,'' I shot back. ``I am merely regarding titles.''
Truly, one never appreciates a thing quite so much as when one is deprived of it. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College. by CNB