Reading

FORTY YEARS AGO a well intentioned friend of mine dug deep into his affluent pockets and rented a vacant building in the college town district for the then exorbitant sum of five hundred dollar a month. It was an old funky edifice in an appropriately funky, quirky college town party district. His intention was to establish a reading room within a local and national culture in which most Americans already had a place to read, and in which the average American reads one book or fewer after graduating high school. He outfited the old building with used furniture and book cases, filled them with books, and brought in as many interesting books and magazines as he could obtain, place them invitingly on tables next to comfortable chairs. He anticipated that some people would bring in their own reading mateiral,and perhaps, upon completing it, donate it to the cause...Only, nobody, other than an occasional straggler or two, bothered to showed up. No customers for the free service, perhaps not surprisingly. Local intellectuals and students, it began to appear, were already well provided with reading material and places to read, textbooks in libraries and private homes, He named his baby "Citizens and Philosophers", did no advertising, erected no signs to capture attention. My friend, it soon seemed, lacked not only business acuman, but possessed of surfeit of wishful thinking, if not presumption. Cutting his losses, He closed up shop, if memory serves, after two months. A mutual friend, a Republican capitalistic type, laughed at him, at how he could possibly even think about opening a business without intending to make a profit from it. At the time my idealistic pseudo entrepenuer friend said that he got the reading room's name from a quote: "The failure of our educational system is the failure to make of us citizens and philosophers." I thought that the quote was beautiful, but never managed to find attribution for it. Even today, Even the great God of Google doesn't seem to know. Maybe nobody said it. Maybe my friend was as imaginative in his literary attributions or lack thereof as he seems to have been in his business universe. It may be true, and doubtless is, that we could do better in instilling civic virtues. Todays' public school curriculum has tended in recent years more toward pragmatic electronic device training, and business training, and less towards the humanities and science. High school students are still probably playing "Solitaire" on their laptops and I phones in class. Or most likely they have moved on to Snap chat and Facebook, and who knows what else. We use our electronic devices to make imaginary connections and friendships in cyber space, as we used to call it, while our connections to other non bot entities in real blood and bone space time dwindle into faceless anonymity. We send text messages to people who are in the same house we are. We are all aware of this, and whereas some people consider it a problem, most people don't seem to concern themselves with it, or even care, a little. I'm an old man who, ike much of the American population, prefers the company of dogs and cats to people. The real consequences of our current socioogical dysfunction will be felt long after I am dead. The average American has one good friend, and the average American is lucky to have that many friends at the end of his or her life. We could use a few Citizens and Philosophers reading rooms all across America's fruited plain. But probably not before we start reading again, and not before we start talking to each other again, instead of to our machines.