Why read?
We live in a digital world.
We live in a world of screens, of iPhones, of ephemera.
Why sit there with the physical book?
This famous picture of Rembrandt's mother
shows us how the act of reading in so many ways is an act of absorption.
The notion of reading is not just the absorption of information;
it is a physical process.
What I would like to share with you this afternoon are the ways -
they told me there would be 150 people here.
Where is everybody?
This notion of reading as absorption is the magic of reading.
The book is a physical object,
and learning how to read as a child
shapes the physical, visual and cognitive imagination.
Before this talk, I prepared by googling "guy reading."
And this is what I got.
I got a picture of a guy bending over a book.
To bend over a book is to be absorbed in the book.
You can see the physicality of the hand.
You can see that Rodin-like, Thinker-esque move of the hand on the chin.
You can see the visor over the eyes, shielding the sun.
Reading a traditional book is an act of absorption.
Reading on a screen is an act of spectatorship;
it is theatrical.
This is a picture from the late 1980s,
and I vividly remember when the screens first arrived,
how we did not look down, but we looked out.
We did not put our hands on our chins,
but we pointed our fingers at the screens.
And you can see here,
as the man leans over the woman, pointing at the screen,
you can see here how the very act of reading
changes your physical relationship to the text -
from one of privacy, absorption and involvement
to one of spectatorship, of theatricality, of publicness.
It's very hard to read privately with a screen.
Therefore, in the early 21st century,
the e-book emerged, I believe,
as a way of recovering, digitally,
the experience of reading privately.
The e-book is not a real book.
The e-book is a simulacrum of a book.
They replace paper with something electronic.
E-books are to real books as e-cigarettes are to real cigarettes.
Did you like that one?
You think that's very funny?
Next time I do this, I'm going to travel with you
so you can sit in the front and laugh loudly with people.
(Laughter)
How many of you are grown-ups in this audience?
I spend all my life talking about digital culture.
You know, at my age,
the only word that should follow digital is "examination."
(Laughter)
That's what - that's a joke for the adults.
How many of you smoke e-cigarettes?
How many of you smoke real cigarettes?
How many of you couldn't give a fl- about what I'm talking about?
E-cigarettes.
They are like e-books.
They are the technological and mechanical instruments
for delivering pleasure
that used to be delivered through paper.
They are a simulacrum of the experience.
And I believe very strongly,
whether you read on a tablet or whether you read on a screen,
you need to return to the physical book.
And you need to recognize
that for as long as literacy has been around,
the physical book, the illustrated book
has been central to the formation of the child, the human being.
This is a papyrus manuscript from the 3rd century.
It represents the Labors of Hercules.
This is the earliest illustrated children's book that survives.
Why were the Labors of Hercules children's book reading?
Because in school, every child felt Herculean:
"How am I going to pass that test?
It's like conquering the Nemean lion."
"How am I going to fulfill the assignment?
It's like sweeping out the Augean stables."
"How am I going to show up for a class at 9:30 in the morning?
It's like slicing off the heads of the Hydra."
The image of Hercules fighting the lion
becomes the emblem of reading and learning as an act of heroic labor.
It is also an act of devotion.
This beautifully illuminated manuscript from the Anglo-Saxon period
shows us how in the study of the Psalms, the study of the Bible,
the purpose of the book was to attract the child's attention.
King Alfred the Great, who was king of the Anglo-Saxons in the 890s,
wrote about how his own mother
showed him a beautifully illustrated book, as a child.
And the word he uses -
now remember, this is old stuff so he's talking and writing in Latin -
he says it's "pulchritude," female beauty.
He is electus; he is seduced and drawn in by the pulchritude,
by the beauty of the book.
Is reading a form of seduction?
Reading is certainly a form of seduction here
in this manuscript of Terence's plays,
prepared for a schoolroom in a monastery,
where the children would see the representation of the actors,
they would see the visual ways
in which the story that they were reading is presented to their mind's eye.
When print came into Europe,
one of the first things that was printed was Aesop's Fables,
those childish stories of talking animals,
of rabbits and hares, of foxes and wolves and goats,
all of whom took on a moral quality.
There you see the figure of Aesopus.
There you see the animals.
Are you seduced?
Are you attracted?
Are you excited by the visual image of the book?
When I was a child, the books that I fell in love with
were the illustrated children's books
by the writer and painter Robert McCloskey:
"One Morning in Maine,"
"Blueberries for Sal,"
"Make Way for Ducklings,"
and "Time of Wonder."
These are books that Illustrated to the child
the possibility not just of an imaginary but of an aesthetic life.
Life was beautiful.
The job of reading
was to experience the beauty of the world
as represented by the artist and the illustrator.
"Time of Wonder" is a story.
It's a book that was published in 1957, when I was two years old.
And we began reading it in my family throughout the '50s and the '60s.
We were fascinated by the idea
that here was a family living on the coast of the state of Maine.
I was a child in Brooklyn.
Maine was another country for me.
It was exotic.
The very idea that there was a coastline,
the very idea that one could see poetry and passion,
magic and miracle
in a coming storm over the sea.
This beautiful illustration and the poetic text that accompanies it
shows us how,
hoping for a chance to drop out of the channel,
the fishing boat wallows in the waves, seeking the shelter.
You can hear in the alliteration,
you can hear in the rhythm there,
the poetry of the water lapping on the shore.
And in the course of this book, there is a storm that comes up.
The storm comes through.
It blows through the parlor.
It wrecks the living room.
The Parcheesi game board skittles across the floor.
The books are gone.
The mother reaches for the children.
The lamp has disappeared.
It is as if a trauma has come through the house.
And when the storm is over,
all is calm.
Look at this picture.
Now the mother and the children sing their own psalms of joy,
the books once again placed perfectly open and closed on the table.
And Dad.
Remember, this is the 1950s.
In the 1950s, Dad can do anything.
I grew up in the '50s.
When I became a dad in the 1990s,
I discovered that dads can do nothing.
But in the '50s, dads did everything.
And you will see in this picture
how the dad takes a dishcloth
and covers over one of the last of the broken panes of glass -
a window now broken up in frames
that looks all the world like a set of splayed-open books.
Each pane, each window,
looking like the side of a book
and matching - if you like, even rhyming visually -
with the open book on the table.
When I was a child in the 1950s,
the world of the imagination was the world of books.
But we did not have the thunderstorms of Maine.
We did not have the psalters of the imagination.
We had the fears of nuclear attack.
Look at the difference between this picture of the family
and this picture of the family.
This, too, from the 1950s:
the fallout shelter,
the mother and the father and the child sitting around a text,
now not of the imagination, but an instructional manual.
And the only words you see in this picture
are the words, "canned food."
As if in this apocalyptic moment,
we would have no words left for the imagination.
And so when I grew up, and when I became a parent,
I wanted to give my own son this sense of magic that I experienced,
the idea that a book could take us to another world,
that reading was a form of magic.
And fortunately for me,
and probably fortunately for many of you,
Harry Potter came along.
Many of you think that Harry Potter is a set of stories
about magic and wizardry and sorcery and the imagination.
I want to argue that Harry Potter is a book about reading.
Magic in Harry Potter
is nothing more than a heightened form of literacy.
Reading in Harry Potter is the true magic.
The potions, the spells,
the true adventures in the world of Harry Potter go on,
not on the Quidditch pitch, not in the forest,
but in the library.
And Hermione and Ron and Harry,
as you can see in one of these screenshots
from one of the films,
live out their lives in the magic and mystery of the book.
And so, in "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,"
Harry comes upon an old, used book of potions.
And written in the margins are corrections to the book.
It tells Harry how to crush the Sopophorous bean
with the back of a knife, releasing the juice.
It tells Harry how to complete his assignments effectively.
In the marginalia to the "Book of Potions,"
Harry finds the true magic of reading.
What he does not yet know - and what we will soon find out -
is that the Half-Blood Prince, of course, is Snape himself.
Harry brings the book into the library,
and the librarian is terrified
that Harry has despoiled or desecrated the book.
Have any of you had an encounter with a librarian?
Librarians are all about keeping things clean
and keeping things in order.
Libraries are sites of regulation, not imagination.
The job of the librarian is to keep your hands clean,
to keep you quiet
and to make sure that if you are late returning a book, you pay for it.
These are the structures of society and civilization.
For Harry Potter, the splayed margins,
the almost manic marginalia here -
oh, that's a good one -
the almost manic marginalia -
are you taking notes? -
the almost manic marginalia of the book -
are you going to write that one down too? good -
give us the sense
that the true imagination is not to be found in the lines,
but all around the lines.
"Levicorpus, raise the body."
This is one of the spells that Harry Potter learns,
written in the margins by the Half-Blood Prince.
He learns the spell and takes it back to his room,
where he suspends his friend Ron,
as if from an invisible cord from the roof of the room.
Levicorpus, raise the body.
If you grew up in a Western Christian tradition,
you would know that "Levicorpus, raise the body"
is the idiom of the very centerpiece of Christian belief,
the resurrection, raise the body,
but also Levicorpus, raise the body.
What I have tried to suggest to you today,
at the end of a day full of digital imagination,
full of virtual realities,
full of professional expertise
and full of instruction and success and getting ahead,
is that the real magic of reading lies in Levicorpus.
For what the true book does is it raises our body;
it suspends us in the fantasies of fiction.
The magic of the book,
whether it is a magic of digital or traditional literacy,
is the magic of the literate imagination.
And what I've tried to suggest to you today
is that by thinking about the history of the book,
by thinking about your own experiences,
you may ask yourselves,
"Am I Ron?"
"Am I Hermione?"
or "Am I Hercules?"
Think of yourselves now in the schoolroom of the Herculean imagination.
And the next time you enter a classroom or a TED Talk,
ask yourself, "Levicorpus, has the teacher raised the body?
And in this book,
am I suspended in by imagination?"
Thank you very much.
(Applause)