WE MAY BE THE LAST GENERATION THAT READS FOR PLEASURE

</body>

The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. 

As in, they hadn't cracked the spine of a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in the car. 

The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.

 In 1978, Gallup found that 42 percent of adults had read 11 books or more in the past year 

(13 percent said they'd read more than 50!).

 Today, Pew finds that just 28 percent hit the 11 mark.

The number of books an American reads tends to be closely associated with his or her level of education.

College enrollment last year fell by nearly half a million.

 Between 2012 and 2013, the Census Bureau reported, 463,000 fewer people were enrolled in college.

In fact, this is the second year enrollment has fallen by that much, 

bringing the two-year total to 930,000 fewer college students, bigger than any drop before the recession.

Our natural response is to deny.  I am sure the dinosaurs did a lot of that before the end.

The decline could have grim consequences as people tune out books, tune in popular culture and become less socially and civicly engaged.
 

It's fairly obvious why teenagers today aren't devoting more time toward reading:

  

There are simply more and cooler ways to distract oneself than in the previous generations.

How many teenagers today don't have both a cell-phone and an i-Pad?

  

Very few.

When faced with the decision of whether to read a novel or dive into social media, a majority of teens today are going cyber-diving.

After many years of a childhood that didn't have interactions with books on their own, 

they are forced to read the school’s regardless of the topic and develop a negative attitude toward them.

This hatred of books lasts into teenage years and leads many to never read again.

The future built by the current teenage generation will be one where books and reading 

as well as knowledge and reasoning becoming less important if they continue their ignorance toward literacy.

This scares me and causes me to think that indeed there will be a plateau of human intellect if not a decline with few advances in all subjects.

In a dangerous world filled with stress, the key to survival is memory.

So says the author of The Executioners (later known as "Cape Fear"), John D. MacDonald.

In his last published work before he died in 1986, MacDonald set out to inspire us with Reading for Survival.

This thirty-one page essay was published in 1987 by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

It was also sponsored by the Florida Center for the Book in Fort Lauderdale.

The essay takes the form of a series of conversations between his fictitious protagonist, Travis McGee, and his friend known only as "Meyer", an economist, teacher and lecturer.

Meyer guides us through his version of the evolution of communication beginning with our earliest ancestors' dependency on memory in order to live in the wilderness,

recognize signs of nature and the animal kingdom, and then share that knowledge with future generations.

Meyer asks, "Can one examine his own life without reference to the realities in which he lives?"

What about the non-reader, the person who wants to believe that just because he isn't well informed there is no harm?

He's the one "born every minute" that signs up for that variable interest loan with a dubious lender.

MacDonald warns us of the teacher who promotes himself as the translator. 

Beware the translator who interprets the information for you.

Think for yourself, he suggests.  And to do that you must read, must be informed.

He warns of the terrible isolation of the nonreader:

 his life is without meaning or substance because he cannot comprehend the world in which he lives

Education, literacy, reading, thinking and remembering are MacDonald's prescription for enduring.

He leaves us with a warning from Mark Twain, 

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."

EXCERPT:

           

“Sorry,” Meyer said. “I was just…”

           

“I know. Thinking.”

          

 He took another swallow. He walked over and sat by the coffee table and put his drink near the lantern.

           

“Strange thing about an idea,” he said. 

“You can never tell whether it is composed of relationships you should have seen before. Most ideas are merely structures—

things built on bits of knowledge and insight you already possess. 

If the knowledge you possess is in error, the structure will be flawed.”

          

 I sat across from him. “What’s this one about?
           

“Maybe the stress of survival.”

         

 “I’ve been stressed now and then .”

          

 “I am thinking of the long range. And if Man actually has a long range remaining to him.”

CAN READING HEAL?

*

"What wound did ever heal but by degrees?," wrote Shakespeare.

Plato wrote, "We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light."

“If you would have me weep,
you must first of all feel grief yourself.”
~ Horace

1.) Each of these quotes made you reflect. IT MAY HAVE ALSO EXTENDED YOUR LIFE!

The world is gradually dividing into two populations.

Not the “haves” and “have-nots” of the political agitators. This is something much more precious than mere money: It’s those who learn and those who don’t.

In bald numbers, educated men live 14 years longer, on average, than uneducated men.

Educated women live 10 years longer, on average, than uneducated women.

But learning minds are not limited to those with degrees ... learning minds are merely those who read, reflect, and learn from the prose.

2.) READING AS VALIUM.

Reading is the best way to relax and even six minutes can be enough to reduce the stress levels by more than two thirds, according to new research.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5070874/Reading-can-help-reduce-stress.html

And it works better and faster than other methods to calm frazzled nerves such as listening to music, going for a walk or settling down with a cup of tea, research found.

Psychologists believe this is because the human mind has to concentrate on reading and the distraction of being taken into a literary world eases the tensions in muscles and the heart.

The research was carried out on a group of volunteers by consultancy Mindlab International at the University of Sussex.

Reading worked best, reducing stress levels by 68 per cent, said cognitive neuropsychologist Dr David Lewis.

Subjects only needed to read, silently, for six minutes to slow down the heart rate and ease tension in the muscles, he found. In fact it got subjects to stress levels lower than before they started.

Listening to music reduced the levels by 61 per cent, have a cup of tea of coffee lowered them by 54 per cent and taking a walk by 42 per cent.

Playing video games brought them down by 21 per cent from their highest level but still left the volunteers with heart rates above their starting point.

3.) PLATO NOT PROZAC:

The idea that literature can make us emotionally and physically stronger goes back to Plato.

But now book groups are proving that Shakespeare can be as beneficial as self-help guides. There is a rise in bibliotherapy.


Medical staff tell stories of the remarkable successes they've seen:

the neurological patient who sat in a group saying nothing for months, then after a reading of George Herbert's poem "The Flower"

("Who would have thought my shrivelled heart

Could have recovered greenness?")

launched into a 10-minute monologue at the end of which he announced "I feel great."

The brain-damaged young man whose vocabulary significantly increased after he joined a book group;

the husband caring for his disabled wife whose exposure to poetry has proved not just a respite but a liberation.

To outsiders, the outcomes might seem small, but to the staff and patients concerned they're huge breakthroughs.

Judith Mawer of the Mersey Care Mental Health Trust explained,

focusing on a book is the decisive factor:

"People who don't respond to conventional therapy, or don't have access to it, can externalise their feelings by engaging with a fictional character, or be stimulated by the rhythms of poetry."

One particularly successful initiative has been reading poetry to and with dementia patients, some of whom have lost all sense of who and where they are but can recite the words of a poem learned at school 70 years ago.

"One sheds one's sicknesses in books," DH Lawrence once wrote.

Bibliotherapy, as it's called, is a fast-growing profession. A recent survey suggests that "over half of English library authorities are operating some form of bibliotherapy intervention.

Read the evocative words of Emmylou Harris from THE PEARL which touched the dark heart of a patient struggling with Cancer:

O the dragons are gonna fly tonight
They're circling low and inside tonight
It's another round in the losing fight
Out along the great divide tonight

We are aging soldiers in an ancient war
Seeking out some half remembered shore
We drink our fill and still we thirst for more
Asking if there's no heaven what is this hunger for?

Our path is worn our feet are poorly shod
We lift up our prayer against the odds
And fear the silence is the voice of God

And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah

Sorrow is constant and the joys are brief
The seasons come and bring no sweet relief
Time is a brutal but a careless theif
Who takes our lot but leaves behind the grief

It is the heart that kills us in the end
Just one more old broken bone that cannot mend
As it was now and ever shall be amen

And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah

So there'll be no guiding light for you and me
We are not sailors lost out on the sea
We were always headed toward eternity
Hoping for a glimpse of Gaililee

Like falling stars from the universe we are hurled
Down through the long loneliness of the world
Until we behold the pain become the pearl

Cryin´ Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah

And we cry Allelujah Allelujah
We cry Allelujah
***
For the Cancer patient there was emotional healing to these words.

*{A photo of some of the leather bound volumes in one of my bookcases.}