Practical Impact

God.

How depressing.

One blog thus far under my belt.

What happened to the quiet, reserved, dilligently well-rehearsed student I used to be?

He talks now, is always talking.

Those who know don't speak; those who speak don't know.

I'm graduating in December (hopefully), and yet I feel I'll have none of the tools necessary to help succeed in my target career of...

Well, at any rate, I admit all the blame. My bad, folks. I've caught a second wind and promise that I will be more proactive at this blogging thing. And I will I will I will respond to all of you at least once. It's just taken a little getting used to 4 English classes and a Speech class; I'm the world's worst time-budgeter.

But enough of this self-pitying nonsense. Wait - is it nonsense?

This is the escape from the public sphere that Chartier mentions in his "The Practical Impact of Writing." Isn't it? Blogging is the new library. And maybe if I decide to venture off on a self-absorbed, narcissistic tangent. So what? Find a new book. Put this one away.

I'm not always so hostile. It's a symptom of my kill or be killed mentality; years of repression and practicing the defensive arts knotted up and convoluting around the spine of my self-defeat. I've been in Chartier's library for as long as I can imagine. "The tension between the desire to withdraw from the crowd while at the same time maintaining control over the world is probably symbolic of the absolute liberty made possible by commerce with books, hence of the possibility of complete self-mastery without constraint or supervision" (Chartier, 130). I blame these books for my hermitism. They enticed me into a world (or did they create it entirely?), took away my eyesight (or turned off the lights?), and left me groping for an exit along this cool, smooth, stone.

Like Samuel Pepys, I knew not how in the world to abstain from reading. Like John Locke (although not to the obsessive-compulsive extent to which he endeavored), I organized my books, once alphabetically, once chronologically. I liked to pause and look at the cover every so often - as a gauge of my progress, no doubt, but also a reiteration of the world that was within being created (since then I've learned much in the way of how, specifically, the cover art of a novel affects the author's words, and how, generally, the editing and publication and marketing choices affect the public perception of a given work of art).

Reading was very much a private experience for me; so much so, in fact, that I could never have imagined a time when people didn't read silently. It almost seems absurd to us now, but logically, it follows very much the transition from an oral society to a print society, a kind of liminal stage - a Venn diagram, if you will - wherein certain attributes of the preceding stage have been filtered out and replaced by certain attributes of the succeeding stage.

Chartier's account of this transition is cohesive and illuminating, ascertaining that these new kinds of reading evolved out of either necessity or by arbitrary coincidence. Either way, it was a natural evolution, and no amount of opposition could stem the acquisition of this new skill: "Silent reading was faster, easier, and more immediate in its impact on the inner self" (Chartier, 125).

As it has been for me.

Thank you, Silent Reading.

Thank you for keeping me in the social cocoon to incubate longer than those around me. In postponing my metamorphosis until just a couple of years ago, you guaranteed I would emerge twice as awkward, twice as insecure, twice as timid, and twice as pitiful.

Yes. I admit. I owe to you my somewhat confident writing voice. But I am appalled at what cost to the surety of my public voice, my speaking voice, my "vocal" voice!

Ahem.
-M.C.

2 comments:

  1. Wow. I applaud you on your honesty and can honesty say in return that I've been there. The majority of my own childhood was spent in my own world of silent reading. You could not pull me away. Granted, I have my own reasons for going to that inner place of contemplation - as did you - and suffered for it as well. Other than my handful of friends from high school, my social career was a bungling, insecure mess.

    I assure you that won't always be the case. Like-mindedness - especially when it comes to books - will put a quick end to that. Chartier is right, we naturally evolve our means of communication to serve the advent of technology. The availability of books led to a revolution in silent reading; the rise of Web 2.0 will lead to your own voice. Indeed, from this very post, you can already tell it has.

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  2. It seems that nothing can prepare you less for the rigors of the high school social pecking order than reading. The characters in your classes just aren't as interesting as the ones in books...

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