…These are darkening days for those of us who love books. But we needn’t drift apathetically into a horror story. The English philosopher Roger Scruton wrote of beauty that it is “vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter.” Well, that’s true of reading. It is vanishing from our world because we live as if it doesn’t matter. We are on our phones.
Like characters in a scary story, we need to see that we are drifting toward disaster and save ourselves, before it’s too late. Each of us has the power to show that reading does matter. We can do it by reading—and being seen reading—with dedication, bravado and a bit of countercultural aggression. Be the person on the train who pulls out a paperback rather than a phone. Be the parent in the pediatrician’s waiting room who reads a story rather than letting your child zone out on a tablet. Be the spouse who chooses a novel after dinner over the television. Be the teacher who transfixes the class with a live reading rather than a canned video. Revive the old social norms by setting them yourself…
Poetry and literature are art forms that can lift a person from blinkered individual existence to sublime and broadened understanding. Books form a great reverberating conversation across the centuries, joining the minds of men and women long dead with those alive today. If we lose reading, we lose the connection, and we consign future generations to a kind of witless groping around in cultural obscurity. It is vital, though, to recognize where we are now. English majors are struggling to read Dickens. If we let this slide, in a decade we’ll be lucky if graduate students can parse “Fun with Dick and Jane.”
— Meghan Cox Gurdon, from “Put Down the Phone and Pull Out a Book, Revel in words and writing. Let the world see you doing it.” (wsj.com, July 22, 2025)
