Why read? | Seth Lerer | TEDxUCSD

In this talk, Seth Lerer makes an emphatic argument for why we should read. In today's digital era with screens and e-readers, Seth illustrates the importance of the book through the rich history of reading.

Seth Lerer was born in Brooklyn, New York and was educated at Wesleyan University, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. Seth taught at Princeton and Stanford before coming to UCSD as Dean of Arts and Humanities in 2009. Seth served as Dean through 2014, and he is now full time in the Literature Department. Seth is finishing a book on Shakespeare’s last plays now, and teaching a range of courses, running from Revelle Humanities through Shakespeare and creative writing.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

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)