Unit 8 The Future of Reading (George Steiner)1 It is hardly necessary for me to cite all the evidence of the depressing state of literacy. These figures from the Department of Education are sufficient: 27million Americans cannot read at all, and a further 35 million read at a level that is less than sufficient to survive in our society. 2 But my own worry today is less that of the overwhelming problem of elemental literacy than it is of the slightly more luxurious problem of the decline in the skills even of the middle-class reader, of his unwillingness to afford those spaces of silence, those luxuries of domesticity and time and concentration, that surround the image of the classic act of reading. It has been suggested that almost 80 percent of Americas literate, educated teenagers can no longer read without an attendant noise (music) in the background or a television screen flickering at the corner of their field of perception. We know very little about the cortex and how it deals with simultaneous conflicting input, but every common-sense hunch suggests we should be profoundly alarmed. This breach of concentration, silence, solitude goes to the very heart of our notion of literacy; this new form of part-reading, of part-perception against background distraction, renders impossible certain essential acts of apprehension and concentration, let alone that most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves, which is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital. 3 Under these circumstances, the question of what future there is for the arts of reading is a real one. Ahead of us lie technical, psychic, and social transformations probably much more dramatic than those brought about by Gutenberg. The Gutenberg revolution, as we now know it, took a long time; its effects are still being debated. The information revolution will touch every facet of composition, publication, distribution, and reading. No one in the book industry can say with any confidence what will happen to the book as weve known it. 4 It now looks as if the arts of reading will fall into three distinct categories. The first will continue lo be the vast, mass of reading for distraction, for momentary entertainment the airport book. I suspect that this kind of reading will more and more involve not cheap paperbacks but cable transmissions to home screens. You will select the book you wish, the speed at which you wish it to be presented on the screen, the speed at which you wish the pages to be turned. Some texts will be read to the viewer by a professional reader. Whether or not the text will appear on the screen as it is being read is an open question. 5 The second -kind of reading will be for information - what De Quincey called “the literature of knowledge, to distinguish it from fiction, poetry, and drama, which he called the literature of power.” The means to acqu.ire the literature of knowledge - the micro circuit, the silicon chip, the laser disc - will alter our habits beyond anything we can now conceive. “The Library of Babel, the library of all possible libraries that Borges imagined in his fable, will be literally and concretely accessible for personal and institutional use. We will be able to summon it up on a screen, and here the possibility of a basic change in the structures of attention and understanding is almost incommensurable. 6 What about reading in the old, private, silent sense? This may become as specialized a skill and avocation as it was in the scriptoria and libraries of monasteries during the so-called Dark Ages. We now know these were in fact key ages, radiant in their patience, radiant in their sense of what had to be copied and preserved. Private libraries may once again become as notable and rare as they were when Erasmus and Montaigne were famous for theirs. The habit of furnishing a room, a large room, possibly, with shelves and filling them with books, not paperbacks but bound books, the attempt to collect the complete editions of an author (itself a very special concept) as well as the first editions, not necessarily the rare books of the Morgan Library but the first editions of a modern author, with the hope of owning everything by a writer - good, bad, or in-different - whom one loves; the ability - above all, the wish - to attend to a demanding text, to master the grammar, the arts of memory, the tactics of repose and concentration that great books demand - these may once more become the practices of an elite, of a mandarinate of silence. 7 Such a mandarinate, such an elite of book men and book women, will not have the power, the political reach, or the prestige that it had during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and almost to the end of the Victorian age. That power almost inevitably will belong to the alliterate. It will belong to the numerate. It will