Few are the cure-alls available to us in the gardens between. Gummies & TM, cold plunging & the baptism of ideologies, these and more are proffered by experts and idiots alike. The perennial tradition recommends the wisdom and pursuit of union in whatever forms we can tranquilly enter into it. The Eastern traditions recommend a path through the self that utilizes that which is always available to us, our inner being. The Christian tradition rejects plurality and prescribes one cure.
In every form they take, purpose-seeking activities of religions, ideologies, power structures, and liberationists agree that there is a disease.
Depending on your beliefs about the spiritual-material space, this conviction takes different forms. This was true in 16th century, enchanted Russia, where pestilence and political entities were endowed by the people with demonic corruption, and in the US in the 20th century that saw the satanic behind toy companies and fictional series. In another community, science is elevated to analyze the sociological, biological, and historical elements that contribute to our current predicament to name structures and systems that are ripe for corruption and bent toward the disease’s flourishing.
In both cases, the sickness seems to remain and social conversation spreads a deep sadness, fear, and mistrust about the state of the world in every era…
A life of reading counteracts the malformation of screen and digital technology. It acts as an antidote to the bad habits of consumerism, utilitarianism, individualism, and other wayward ‘-isms’. In contrast to many other pastimes, reading demands engagement. It asks something of the participant. It cultivates that person’s imagination and increases their vision of the world.
While people argue all the time that reading is not a cure-all, no one believes reading is bad. No one doubts that reading—even if it cannot make a person good—can make a person better…
The case for reading has always been strong, it’s champions numerous and diverse (from leaders of the Civil Rights movement like Howard Thurman & MLK heralding reading’s liberating power to American traditionalists like Charles Dickens & Thomas Jefferson).
Yet never before has it seemed such a perfectly poised antidote to the intoxication of our time…
Read for the same reason that people have read—and shared poems or stories—for thousands of years: because our eyes are not enough by which to see. The time & place in which we live blinds us to other perspectives and ways of being that are not of our own experience. We read because we have been given the gift of imagination & intellect, and we exhibit our gratitude by using it. ~ Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God
