The article... automatically transcribed using iOS. --- It is high time that som... | Hacker News
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It is high time that some one with authority announced that reading is not the summum bonum of life. The very act of reading is unsocial. It is a kind of melancholy barbarism. If you look
The Lost Art of Conversation
IT IS high time that some one in authority announced that reading is not the summum bonum of life. The very act of reading is unsocial. It is a kind of melancholy barbarism. If you look about you in a railway train, in a street car or ‘bus you will observe that every one is reading–men, women, and even the innocent little children. Silent, glum, their eyes glued to book or paper, they sit there, like so many savages brooding in a jungle. Where are the jolly conversations that Washington Irving and Dickens overheard in the stage-coaches of the long ago? Where is the cheery sociability that once made traveling a liberal education?
Conversation is in the way of becoming a lost art – like the making of mummies and the laying of the great auk's egg. We have such a precious deal of reading to do that conversation is out of the question. We have no time to talk. We have no leisure for comparing ideas as to the weather. It is not impossible to imagine a day when “How late the spring is!” and “Doesn't it look like rain?” will be quite obsolete. We are reading ourselves into a silent race. When we stay at home we read; we travel to read. In lonely forests, on far-away mountain peaks, aship, ashore, our generation wanders – and reads. At this very moment some one is reading in the desert of the Sahara and another is reading as he treks the African veldt, and Andre himself is ice-bound near the Pole, reading.
Before long monastic institutions for the undisturbed pursuit of reading will doubtless arise all over the land. Reading is the superstition of the day. The amount of printed matter we have read is accounted to us for a sort of righteousness. I stopped to watch some boys playing baseball the other day. There was a duffer at the bat, and the little left-fielder pulled a paper from his hip pocket and began to read. General Shafter, it is averred, lay in a hammock and directed the battle, at odd moments dipping his nose into the newspapers.
Conversation is decaying and we are degenerating into unsocial silence. This is not a negligible danger. Man's chief duty – his unending duty – the proper aim of life is to talk. Soldiers fight, statesmen plan, artists paint, poets rhyme merely that they may talk and be talked about. Men live nobly in order to have fine topics of conversation. Books are written not so much to be read as to be talked over.
The decay of conversation is a ready-made subject for the critically minded man. The divergence between the written and spoken language is growing wider every day. We talk in a sort of telegraphic slang. No sane man would think of introducing into his conversation the phrases and words of the written language. Very little of the spoken language gets into print. In the end the books will beat the tongues. Already we exchange ideas with printed pages not with our fellow-men- and I foresee the dismal day when even our present emasculated conversation will be superfluous. We shall read our way in silence from the cradle to the grave.
VANCE THOMPSON.
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