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By Meghan Peterson
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”― Ray Bradbury
During a recent trip to Brainerd Memorial Library, a “Top 10” local destination for me and my boys, I came face to face with a very loud realization in the midst of the library quietude.
We had checked out a couple of books, the boys redeemed their weekly summer reading lists for a prize of their choosing (support your local library!), they settled down to play in the children’s area, and I began to read aloud one of the books we had just borrowed.
It dawned on me: I could not be more grateful to have – at that precise moment – the blessing of reading aloud to my children. The act of reading flings the doors of the mind and spirit wide open. To read is to enter worlds, galaxies, spaces, universes, paradigms that otherwise would not exist or be. Reading aloud then takes the foundational praxis of reading, externalizes it and invites both reader and listener to participate in this re-creative act.
Reading is freedom. Reading aloud amplifies that freedom, supplying the verbal megaphone for written ideas, characters, plots, destinies: the oral tradition encapsulated, fortified. Reading – and reading aloud – urges the mind and spirit to reflect, ponder, muse, meander or even go on tangents. Perhaps we do not go on enough tangents nowadays. How ironic.
In our current culture, drowning beneath the Instagram/Tik-Tok/Snapchat deluge, we flounder in the midst of a feeding frenzy of talking and typing. But is anyone genuinely saying anything with meaning, purpose and intent? Or, equally important, listening with focus and intent?
When we read a book – in particular, when we read a book aloud to our kids – there is such a powerful hold-my-heartbeat-in-my-chest feeling because it is suddenly only meaningful, purposeful, intentional. In a culture that seeks to place a time constraint on everything and anything; in a society that seeks to place captions on everything and anything; in a world that condenses value systems into fifteen-second reels, meaning gets lost.
Our voices get lost in the din – beneath the technological avalanche. If we do not take time or care, those voices – and the freedoms they carry – may get buried. Maybe it was never about taking books away. It did not even have to come to that. All that had to occur was enough chaotic volume to drown us all out. Unless, of course, we decide to make being a bookworm an important lifestyle again. If we want to salvage our autonomy and our liberty, reading – and reading aloud – may be just one small shout of freedom to rally us above the noise.
