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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