A History of Reading by Maria Popova

Writing freezes the moment. Reading is forever. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic, Carl Sagan poignantly ob served. And while the writer-storyteller puts in place the pieces necessary for that magic to manifest, the catalyst is the reader s imagination. But how, exactly, did we cultivate the skill of reading, which is so central to our intellectual i dentity? In A History of Reading (public library), Steven Roger Fischer traces h ow we went from the dawn of symbols to electronic text, and in the process decon structs what it actually means to read. He offers a poetic frame in the introduction: What music is s, bewitches, reen and they ings, inspire to the spirit, reading is to the mind. Reading challenges, empower enriches. We perceive little black marks on white paper or a PC sc move us to tears, open up our lives to new insights and understand us, organize our existences and connect us with all creation.

Surely there can be no greater wonder. He then explores the yin-yang of reading and writing: Though reading and writing go hand in hand, reading is actually writing s antithes is indeed, even activating separate regions of the brain. Writing is a skill, re ading is a faculty. Writing was originally elaborated and thereafter deliberatel y adapted; reading has evolved in tandem with humanity s deeper understanding of t he written word s latent capabilities. Writing s history has followed series of borr owings and refinements, reading s history has involved successive stages of social maturation. Writing is expression, reading impression. Writing is public, readi ng personal. Writing is limited, reading open-ended. Writing freezes the moment. Reading is forever. [ ] Reading has always been different from writing. Writing prioritizes sound, as th e spoken word must be transformed or deconstructed into representative sign(s). Reading, however, prioritizes meaning. The faculty of reading has, in fact, very little to do with the skill of writing. What is reading, then? The answer is not simple, as the act of reading is variab le, not absolute. In its most general modern definition, reading is of course th e ability to make sense of written or printed symbols. The reader uses the symbol s to guide the recovery of information from his or her memory and subsequently u ses this information to construct a plausible interpretation of the writer s messa ge . But reading has not always been this. Initially it was the simple faculty of extracting visual information from any encoded system and comprehending the resp ective meaning. Later it came to signify almost exclusively the comprehending of a continuous text of written signs on an inscribed surface. More recently it ha s included the extracting of encoded information from an electronic screen. And reading s definition will doubtless continue to expand in future for, as with any faculty, it is also a measure of humanity s own advancement. [ ] Reading is not merely the attaching of sound to grapheme, which occurs only at a n elementary level. Meaning is involved, and in a fundamental way. At a higher l

evel of perception reading can even convey meaning alone, without any recourse t o sound. Therein lies reading s sense-like magic. He goes on to explore the five phases of information exchange production, transm ission, reception, storage, and repetition pointing out that with writing, they occur either aurally or visually, but reading is a synesthetic process that ofte n combines the two sense of hearing and sight. He then offers a brief history of how shapes became sounds: Sign became sound free from its system-external referent in Mesopotamia between 6,000 and 5,7000 years ago. The idea soon spread, west to the Nile and east to t he Iranian Plateau and even to the Indus, where different languages and differen t social needs demanded other graphic expressions. Everywhere, writing was recog nized to be an invaluable tool for accumulating and storing information: it faci litated accounting, material storage and transport, and it retained names, dates and places better than human memory ever could. All early reading involved very s imple code recognition, and was invariably task-oriented.

To read was Sumerian ita ( it, id, ed), meaning also to count, calculate, consider, mem rize, recite, read aloud . Very few in Mesopotamia could ever achieve this faculty . Around 2000 BC at Ur, the region s greatest metropolis with a population of arou nd 12,000, only a small proportion perhaps one out of a hundred, or about 120 pe ople at most could read and write. From 1850 to 1550 BC the Babylonian city-stat e of Sippar, with approximately 10,000 inhabitants, housed only 185 named scribes (that is, official tablet writers), ten of whom were in fact women. It appears f rom this and similar statistics elsewhere that no more than at most a few score literates were alive in Mesopotamia s city-states at any given time. [ ] From this near-universal failure of Mesopotamian scribes to elaborate a more use r-friendly literature, one can deduce that reading was predominantly work. That is, it was not a solitary, agreeable, silent business* but public, taxing and lo ud. The written word very often served simply to prompt the retrieval of a text earlier learnt by heart. For all Mesopotamian literature, even written literatur e, was public and oral. Writing was still a means to an end, the public performa nce, a tradition stretching back tens of thousands of years, and not yet an end in itself: the solitary confrontation with the written word. Tablets spoke for those whose seals were impressed on them. Judges in Babylon, for example, could speak of a tablet s contents as its mouth , could publicly assert the y had heart the tablet (in a way very similar to how today s judges read affidavits) . There was no contesting, no challenge by witnesses in attendance; denying one s seal brought severe punishment. The written voice was the actual voice. (* One has to wonder just how much we ve regressed to that ancient user-unfriendli ness in today s age of atrocious pagination, endless slideshows, and loud, tragica lly ad-infested online publishing, which make the experience of reading anything but agreeable and silent. ) A History of Reading is part of Fischer s fascinating Globalities trilogy, alongsi de A History of Writing and A History of Language.