Thursday, March 14, 2013

Don't Take Your Library for Granted!



If only we could reach back in time and pull Thoreau into the present. Sure, he’d be horrified at the extent of “de-naturalization” that’s happened since the industrial revolution. But he might be pleasantly surprised to see how books are so much easier to procure nowadays. 

Today we all take the accessibility of literature for granted. But at Thoreau’s time public libraries weren’t as common, and the ones that were in existence didn’t have the selection, nor was it always easy to get to the library. I’ve lived down the street from one library or another for as long as I can remember, and the idea of waiting for a bookmobile, or not being able to put items on hold if that particular library didn’t own it…horrific. I’d probably go into withdrawal.

And even without access to libraries, I grew up surrounded by books my mom had collected, so there was never a lack of reading material. I don’t think Thoreau could grasp the sheer volume of what has been written. 

Yet our wealth of books is continually overlooked in favor of other entertainment media. Television and movies have made people so used to instant gratification that they don’t invest the time required to make use of their literacy. People have more free time today than any other time in the course of history, yet they make no use of their ample time to read masterpieces that should be “read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

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