In Defense of Reading in Crisis

Reading is, in many ways, a luxury. When you have a physical book in your hands, you can feel the pages - sometimes thick, rich with ink, sometimes thin, crepe-like. Delicate. When you're listening to an audiobook, there is nothing more satisfying than a voice that matches perfectly the character, the setting, bringing to life in your ears an entire world outside of our own. And those e-books. How rich it feels to have hundreds - thousands even - of stories at your fingertips, tiny enough to fit in a bag, a purse, a pocket, if you're lucky enough. How luxurious.

And yet, here we live, in a world galloping towards facism (if you're in the United States as I am), globally looking at devastating environmental crises and colonialism that can never quite be left in the past centuries where it never belonged, but where it ran rampant. 

So I found myself thinking, where does luxury fit in a world that is on the precipice of collapse? What right do I have to sit in my air conditioned apartment, candles lit for ambiance, a book, or two, or three, waiting at my bedside for when I return home from work? Or tucked into my bag when I need a break (though those breaks come few and far between - working in a job directly impacted by, and in many ways in opposition to, the United States administration means that the work is never quite done, not really). 

Sure, some reading isn't a luxury, and is arguably a necessity. Histories that teach us what we never learned in school. Fiction that predicts where we're headed if we don't stop the chaos. The confusion. The destruction. Books that tell stories from other places, other cultures - fiction that encourages empathy in a world that discourages it. That reading may not be a luxury.

But what of reading for joy? For escapism? To feel something other than despair? Or to feel a despair, just for moments, that isn't your own? Where does that reading fit, when there is a crisis at every corner.

I've been taught to never ask a question to which I don't know the answer. So perhaps it's silly to ask a question to which there may be no answer. And it is most certainly a privilege to get to ask. To get to bask in the luxury, regardless of its place. 

But, dear reader, here's my answer anyway. It may be different from yours. It's cobbled together in a mind that has felt anger, and desperation, and helplessness on a rotation for longer than I can remember. I read to learn as much as I do to escape. To study as much as I do to laugh, to feel at its most pure. 

But if reading is a luxury, then to lose it when the privilege exists, means to lose a chance at joy. A chance at rest and relaxation. And even though all of those are privileges that don't exist for everyone - people who can think only moment to moment of survival - to surrender it unbidden means that the opposition is winning. It means that the likes of Donald Trump and all the other leaders steering their lands towards division, towards destruction, are nearing success in their efforts to destroy.

There is a reason that fascists want to ban books. An uneducated populace is one that is easy to control. But I think there's something else there. If reading is a luxury, then to rob it from the populace is to rob the populace of something less tangible than books themselves - something invisible, but something life-sustaining. Reading, movies, music, art - culture can be both a luxury and a necessity. And if we are to survive this crisis, this teetering on the edge of destruction, then at the other end there must be the books, the movies, the music, the art.

And so I choose to read. I fight, sure, because we all must. I believe in a world where housing, clean water, access to healthy food, and kindness are all a possibility. Because I must. But at the end of the day, I light my candles. I light my incense. And I pick up my book. I sink into the luxury, in the hopes that sometime engaging in luxury might not inspire feelings of guilt, feelings of not doing enough, but are rather a well-earned treat at the end of the day in a world that isn't burning.