Serious reading: deep engagement is self-fulfilling
Sven Birkerts:
Fewer and fewer people, it seems, have the leisure or the inclination to undertake [serious reading]. And true reading is hard. Unless we are practiced, we do not just crack the covers and slip into an alternate world. We do not get swept up as readily as we might be by the big-screen excitements of film. But if we do read perseveringly we make available to ourselves, in a most portable form, an ulterior existence. We hold in our hands a way to cut against the momentum of the times. We can resist the skimming tendency and delve; we can restore, if only for a time, the vanishing assumption of coherence. The beauty of the vertical engagement is that it does not have to argue for itself. It is self-contained, a fulfillment.
The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, p. 76
