A requiem for reading?

If, by chance, you’ve joined me on this page—your eyes, my words, the pleasant effort of our minds teamed toward an understanding—welcome to this shared moment.

When we read, our mental landscapes merge. We co-create something. I value this process from both sides—as writer and reader.

That’s why I own so many books and why I feel that libraries are sacred shrines. It is why I’m gravely concerned at a report released this week by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), entitled, “Reading at Risk.”

The report, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census, spanned 20 years and sampled the reading habits of 17,000 Americans, providing statistical measurements by age, gender, education, income, region, race and ethnicity.

In the report’s preface, Dana Gioia, chairman of the NEA, writes, “This comprehensive survey of American literary reading presents a detailed but bleak assessment of the decline of reading’s role in the nation’s culture.

“For the first time in modern history, less than half of the adult population now reads literature [novels, short stories, plays or poetry] and these trends reflect a larger decline in other sorts of reading.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the report states, “The decline in reading correlates with increased participation in a variety of electronic media, including the Internet, video games, and portable digital devices.”

Americans now have such diverse alternatives beckoning our attention that it is no wonder fewer of us apply ourselves to the page. Flashy technological wizardry is tough to resist. Against these seeming enticements, a literary work and the effort it requires of us can seem almost a burden.

Just sitting still long enough to read, and to understand what we’ve read, is more than some of us can muster.

Therein lies part of the problem. Books lack easy flash.

Except within our minds, books do not blink, blip or bleep; they do not throb with thumping beats or pulsate with color and light; they do not display fantastical images to a screen in front of which we sit, mesmerized and almost stupefied by the passive lack of effort involved.

The very nature of literary reading requires us to wake our slumbering imaginative potential, to exercise our innate abilities to vivify scenes within our minds, to enter mental landscapes and to engage with all that an author offers.

Admittedly, this is more effort than many of us wish to summon and raises bigger questions of our culture as a whole. Why does such laxness appeal to us? How can we accept such flabby, flaccid effort?

In days gone by, when people had to “chop wood, carry water,” to stay alive, a byproduct of such effort was often physical fitness. Today, we find ourselves joining gyms to bring our rising blood pressures back down and to carve off the accumulated sloth of lives spent sitting at computers or stretched out on couches in front of the television.

Like food and its effects on the physical body, what we feed our minds determines the quality of our thinking. A telling look at Yahoo’s daily Internet offerings reveals the range of our news options: right there with “Iraq suicide car bomb kills 68, wounds 56,” is “Michael Jackson surprises shoppers at mall.”

It should concern us that “our society’s massive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information” has produced such outcomes.

Even more sobering is the report’s mention of a 1999 study showing that “the average American child lives in a household with 2.9 televisions, 1.8 VCRs, 3.1 radios, 2.1 CD players, 1.4 video game players, and one computer.”

That was five years ago. Imagine the impact on the fertile terrain of a child’s mind.

As Gioia points out, “Reading itself is a progressive skill that depends on years of education and practice. By contrast, most electronic media such as television, recordings, and radio make fewer demands on their audiences, and indeed often require no more than passive participation. Even interactive electronic media, such as video games and the Internet, foster shorter attention spans and accelerated gratification.”

Is this what we envision for our culture? Can we accept the report’s dire conclusion that, “literary culture, and literacy in general, will continue to worsen. Indeed, at the current rate of loss, literary reading as a leisure activity will virtually disappear in half a century”?

Or will we make efforts to visit our libraries and bookstores, to read to a child or an adult? Will we hone our mental edges on collections of essays or short stories, prance through pages of poetry or plays or kneel at the altar of a challenging novel?

Your mind. My mind. A child’s mind. A nation’s cultural legacy. Meet me on the page.