Bemusing Mutability

On Solipsism and the Reading Process

“We read to know that we are not alone.” ~ C.S. Lewis

It is a matter of debate as to whether C.S. Lewis ever made the above statement since the quote was actually uttered by Anthony Hopkins in the movie “Shadowlands” while playing the role of C.S. Lewis and appears in none of his own writings.  You can forgive me the incorrect attribution for moment as you will likely never again see me quote the Christian apologist Lewis since aside from some extremely intriguing critiques of his material, I have not read any of his writings beyond Narnia.  The others are quite far down in the list of my intellectual priorities at present.

I draw upon the quote at this time is because it shook loose a thought when I stumbled over it while Google searching my blog name for reference, duplication and syndication. The Post Literate Epoch? is a blog title appeareing over at a little literary pond called “Bookpuddle” in 2007.  This particular blog was discussing the concept of children in the digital age existing in a post-literate epoch although if they were using the term in accordance with the original theory, they would actually be speaking of the print epoch.

The author found himself in a particular book store overhearing a conversation between a group of high school girls about a book that one of them having not read somehow managed to complete a book report on the text via some data from a website she had accessed.  The group later went on to also express disgust at Jane Austen.

I am no particular fan of Jane Austen either and as I was mentioning to a friend on Facebook earlier, I have only recently returned to a deep reading practice after living as a habitual book skimmer for some 15 years.  And yet this quote resounds so powerfully to me after a weekend at the Black Oaks campground where the subject arose as to whether members of our present era find themselves in the grips of an extreme yet subtle solipsism where no external reality exists outside of their own minds and therefore what they dictate to be the most realistic action and outcome is all that is considered in the course of making a decision.

This quote echoes loudly “We read to know that we are not alone.”  Today I was reading a text entitled “On Being Black” compiled and edited some time in 1970 by Charles T. Davis and Daniel Walden.  Their object in assembling the writings was to draw conclusions and connections between a selection of black authors from the Emancipation period through the waning days of the Black Arts/Freedom/Power movements in the opening of the 70’s and create a discussion for how each writer perceived and used “blackness” in their work.  Anthologies find themselves to be a most useful means to repurpose work that may have been overlooked, ignored or analyzed in singular way in order to obtain a new understanding.

“On Being Black” appears in the outset to accomplish this task quite well as its “Introduction” chapter exhibits the overlapping folds and undergirding currents which define each literary movement through which black people in America have transitioned.  To read the struggle to wrangle this concept of “blackness” during Emancipation, Reconstruction, Renaissance, and all periods forward and between while not allowing it to become its own dogmatism, one continues to feel ever more deeply connected to a long literary tradition and cultural lineage.

And so I ponder now this process of reading and how it strengthens my external interconnectedness.  I am connected now to the author writing and also to the experience of those about whom they have chosen to write.  I am communing with a period of time in which I could not live and partaking of a possibility I had not yet imagined.

Perhaps this is why I find myself disturbed both with the dissolution of the community of reading as well as the community of writing.  Only yesterday I stumbled across the Salon article citing how many aspiring writers have little desire to read.  How then do you connect to others in the larger world?  Are there not sufficient studies to show that your circle of personal friends are typically inclined to be very close to you in thought even when you think them diverse?

Reading is an escape from this mental monoculture.  You want both something different to think about and something more expansive to talk about.  Reading is how you obtain that insight and in the process lift others around you up.  Hopefully, your circle of friends is reciprocating the same.  For if they are not, then you truly are alone because the scene in your mind never changes.  Read and change the wallpaper of thought.