In Praise of Books
Listed on March 13, 2014 in Blogs!Today’s world is full of chatter. It’s like a modern day Tower of Babel where everybody is talking and nobody is listening. The onslaught of communication is so great that silence is a rare and wonderful thing in comparison. It could be argued that one of the outcomes of the noise is a sort of personal and social ‘attention deficit disorder’. A lack of concentration and focus in our individual and collective minds. This sounds terribly serious, and it probably it is, especially since some scientists claim that our brains are becoming rewired in order to cope. So what are we to do about it? Well, recently there has been a study that the reading of books is associated with class. That’s pretty obvious if you ask me and links in which what we know about the people who continue to engage with learning more generally throughout their lives. But the reading of books also slow the brain down and by necessity concentrate the mind. That’s not to say that one isn’t intellectually stimulated, one would hope so. But books act as a sort of personal refuge. A place away from the clamour, a place of stillness and focus and surely an antidote to the other stuff. Oh yes, books are portable, durable, tangible and they don’t need wi-fi or a charger either. Bring on the books, I say.
