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After years and years of staying put, letting work or budget come first, we are finally on vacation. First, in the Dutch Caribbean, where I intend to relax into island rhythms and lose that constant niggling push that drives me through each day’s to-do list. Somehow it is easier here—no one hurries or seems to fret. When I go in search of something I need, I am greeted with “My darling” and a welcoming smile, not a tense what-does-this-one-want-now. And so, after a tipsy cocktail and a leisurely dinner, we pry ourselves away from our oceanside table and walk through dark, soft air to our hotel room. Showered, my mind blissfully blank, I reach for the Elizabeth George paperback I snagged from our town’s Little Library for this occasion.
But there is no reading light.
Even if we leave the overhead light on, it is too dim to light the pages. Muttering the trip’s first profanity, I prop my phone’s flashlight on my bosom. This, I do every night, sure that when we reach Panama, there will be a reading light in the hotel room.
On the flight, Copa uses movies to babysit all of us for three hours. It works like the friar’s potion for Romeo, killing all thought and leaving only a burning collective desire for ginger ale and stale packaged cookies. Back on land, paperback retrieved, I glance down and notice the cover blurb: “From the critically acclaimed author of the Inspector Lynley Mysteries on PBS’s MYSTERY.” Have they not gotten this a bit backwards?
When we check in, I doublecheck, having become that querulous woman of a certain age who wants everything just-so. But geez, surely a light is not too much to ask? Si, si, I am assured there will be a reading light.
There is no reading light. Instead, there are glowing recessed lights for empty niches in the wall, no doubt meant to hold some manner of décor. If I shoved the nightstand aside, I could prop my book inside a niche and read standing up, I suppose….
Out comes the phone again.
When my flashlight and I reach the end of Elizabeth, I ask at the giftshop: Tienes libros? In her earnest answer, I hear the word ninos and know that I am sunk. They have only children’s books. Is it only children who still read? Then she brightens and rummages behind the counter, pulling out a “book”—of recipes.
“No cocina para mi,” I say firmly. This is a holiday from cooking. I trudge back to the room and do crossword puzzles. All this is making me think seriously about what until now has been an intellectual fret: what happens when the world stops reading? When all our stories of one another’s lives and minds are acted out for us in bright colors and surround sound, and all we have to do is let them wash over us, no imagination required?
For me, such escapes are never as complete. What comes at me on a screen is a distraction, an enticement, a lesson, a vicarious thrill, or a bit of show-and-tell. But because it asks nothing of me, does not require me to meet it halfway or even budge an inch, it enters my psyche as itself, scary or sad but not entwined with my own experience. I have not needed to visualize these people, add my own impressions, extend their personalities. I may have longed to be in their quaint or exotic setting, but I have not felt myself there. I have grown fond of the ensemble characters, but they do not live deep inside me the way Sethe and Baby Suggs and Alexander Rostov and Marion Stone and Jo March and the dad in The Chosen do.
Maybe this is a limitation of age and exposure, but all these moving images flit so fast. In privileging video and film, we have lost the ability to set the pace, to pause a minute and think, to flip back to the previous chapter and reconsider something we might have missed. Who rewinds to do that? Even my Kindle makes it harder to find passages that moved me. Yet one is now expected to read only on a Device. We must all travel with our own portals and connect to whatever configuration of electricity we desire. This is supposed to be easier. I find it cumbersome.
I also have the sneaking suspicion that once hooked up, people are more likely to search and click and text than to read a long chain of paragraphs. As I write this, my husband is watching TV in the hotel room, something we usually avoid, because we have both come down with rollicking sinus infections at the trip’s end, and TV does distract from misery. I have rolled in the other direction on the bed, but in the corner of my eye, the colored lights flash, changing at a speed that feels jittery when you are not caught in its trance. Shock and horror are quite possible at this speed—indeed, no words can match footage of a four-year-old girl who starved to death in Gaza—but for lasting compassion and full understanding, you have to slow down and absorb more information.
People who love to read pore happily over the surveys that say people are reading as much as ever and ignore the surveys that say the novel is dead and no one reads for pleasure anymore. All that “reading” is a scanning of digitized text in order to click through. What happened to us? The usual answer is that most people never read much before, either. Yet publishing houses prospered. Now they have all glommed together, starving us of variety and cutting back on the editing that used to polish every manuscript. Too pricey. So the quality suffers and people read even less…and I turn into a crank.
Rethink it, I tell myself. This age demands a different kind of imagination, a different creative manipulation of ideas. Less narrative, more pastiche? Certainly less linear. Empathy will have to come a different way.
And intimacy? Few acts are as quiet, private, and emotionally charged as invisibly entering another world that, in that moment, only you can see and hear. A relationship is formed, a commitment made. Video and film are loud, polyamorous; they make fewer demands and fewer promises.
Intimacy, imagination, empathy—and there are other casualties as well. I used to report for an alt newsweekly, The Riverfront Times, and for years after I left, people would call with issues that needed digging into, injustices that needed to be exposed. They still call—but now I have nowhere left to send them. Instead of two robust daily papers we have a single skinny understaffed one; public radio must beg for its existence; the RFT is dead. What are people supposed to do—write a strongly worded post on their local NextDoor?
At the airport, I open my Atlantic newsletter and see “12 Books to Help You Love Reading Again.” The Atlantic Culture Desk blames politics, technology, and COVID: “Reading is hard right now,” the piece begins. “The pandemic has pushed our already scattered attention spans to crisis point.” We are still blaming the pandemic? I check the date. They have resurrected a piece from 2022, no doubt figuring things are even worse now. As the various writers make their suggestions, they apologize. Zadie Smith’s Intimations “may sound like a terrible idea,” but is not. Turtle Diary “doesn’t move very fast. It doesn’t have any real dramatic tension, either.” In the Dream House “isn’t a memoir you read so much as one that you wander through, room by room.”
Do you even need a flashlight?
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
