Steiner believes we have now passed through the oasis and reentered the desert, with the result that we shall be left with three kinds of reading. The first is reading for distraction – which is what makes the airport book so popular. The second is reading for information…The third kind of reading is a residue of the great age of literacy, now receding rapidly under the compulsions of the Age of Information. It requires silence, patience, a ready capacity for reflection, the training to be challenged by complexity and, above all, a willingness to suspend the distractions of the world so that reader and text may become a unity of time, space, and imagination…
Against Zuckerman’s Hope, there is Steiner’s Prophecy, which he expressed with an ominous briskness: ‘What about reading in the old, archaic, private, silent sense? This may become as specialized a skill and avocation as it was in the scriptoria and libraries of the monasteries during the so-called Dark ages.’
-Neil Postman, A Muted Celebration, from Conscientious Objection, pp. 54-55
Postman’s line of thought here ties in nicely with C.S. Lewis’ conception of (what I call) literacy vs. aliteracy. The issue in our day, in modern America, is not literacy vs. illiteracy, but literacy vs. aliteracy.
Those who read for distraction and information are not necessarily fully literate. Ironically, it is those very sorts of reading (for distraction and information) that may keep us from really reading at all.
Is the “Steiner” referred here Rudolph Steiner?
George Steiner: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Steiner