Prema Jayakumar

We have been celebrating days devoted to talking of reading, weeks devoted to talking of reading, a whole month devoted to talking of reading and libraries.  While it would be interesting to find out how many books got read in this period, as opposed to how many words were spoken and written about reading, at least all these celebrations direct our attention to the act of reading and at least lip-service is paid to the benefits of reading (most children, when they start reading in childhood, are told not to waste time on random books, but to spend that time on their class books).  Of course, we are talking of reading for the pure pleasure of reading and not to acquire knowledge.
Reading to acquire knowledge is all very well and has to be done, if one wants to keep abreast what is happening in one’s subject, be it science or humanities.  The problem with that kind of reading is that it becomes out-dated rapidly, especially in today’s world where anything known (or half-known) is immediately disseminated to the wide world.  New discoveries, new methods of analyses, new and more sensitive tools, all make yesterday’s knowledge just that – knowledge belonging to yesterday and not today.  But fiction and poetry, the ‘useless reading’ that one does for pleasure, never suffers from this problem.  The poets, the dramatists, the novelists, remain as relevant as ever they were, teaching you facts about the human condition, initiating you into the world of emotions, illuminating the way minds inform actions. Subject matters, the background of the stories, may change.  But creative writing is about people, who live and love and die.  We look into their lives to see what these elemental forces – birth, love and death – have on the characters, the narrators of the stories.  And it is in those insights that the value of the book read remains.  This was especially true when the writers were not so aware of the reader who would finally read their books.
Everything in today’s world is targeted at a particular group of people.  Books are categorised into sections by the age of the reader, there are even books for babies which they obviously cannot read, but those they cannot just see, but are safe to chew.  I don’t really know how children slip into the habit of reading these days and whether the chewed books of babyhood make them interested in reading.  As with all people who have now grown old, I do wonder if the children have the sense of adventure that taking a book out of a shelf full of them and not knowing what it was about, gave  the reader when we started reading as children.  We were not given children’s books as a matter of course.  The book we picked was chosen by the accident of being within reach.  The length of your legs and the reach of your arms decided what book you picked.  Very often the words were difficult, but oh the joy when they started making sense and you understood what the author was saying.  And slowly, the people around you too started making sense even when they were irritating, because you had met those emotions and those reactions in your reading.
Books allow you to step into the lives and experiences of others, maturing and broadening our sense of empathy – and a liberal dose of empathy would at least ameliorate the conditions of strife and violence around us.  They also allow you to experience events and emotions you would not easily expose yourself to, from lack of opportunity or an excess of nervousness.  I once read what a border-line autistic young man said about books.  He would go into the public library in his cold town, more for the warmth of the heaters than from any interest in books.  He says how he started reading, not because he wanted to, but just because the books were there, and how it became more prepared to meet the world without the intense anxiety and fear that had been his before. He felt he was better prepared to meet the world.
And so he was.  And so are we all, with books to help us.  After all, as Joyce Carol Oates said, ‘reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily and often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.’