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Proyecto Visión 21

Reading, thinking, and other obsolete pastimes

Francisco Miraval

Several decades ago, during my first years as a college professor, my mentor one day asked me if I knew how many books were available for me to read at the library of the university where I was teaching. I told him and I didn’t know. “Then go and find out”, he told me.

Eventually, I did find the answer, but I don’t remember how many books that library had. I am sure it was several thousands. My mentor then asked me if the books were in alphabetical order or by topics. I told him the books were by topics.

“Then go and read a book about a topic you don’t know and keep reading more books. And when you are done with that topic, find another one and start reading”, he said.

I thought that good piece of advice was the end of the conversation, but it wasn’t. From that day and for the next four or five years, week after week my mentor asked me which books (always plural) I had read that week and which ones I was about to read. Then he assessed how much I understood or misunderstood of the books I had read. And then he added a few more books to my list.

Every so often (unfortunately, not as often as I would have liked), I met my mentor at his home. He always greeted me with many books already open on the table next to a pile of dictionaries and reference works. And then he guided me in reading those texts which, for me, were very deep, distant, and almost incomprehensible. All these years later, I still have the same feeling about those books.

Reading book after book week after week led me not only to just read, thus avoiding the “mental staking over the page” as (I think) Ortega y Gasset once said, but also to develop a dialogue with the mind of the author of the book and another dialogue with my own mind about the meaning of the first dialogue.

Time passed, circumstances changed, and the possibility of reading with the same level of intensity came to an end. The weekly meetings with my mentor also ended. But the internal dialogue never ended and, in fact, it grew stronger.

Many books that once were only found at libraries’ bookshelves and, therefore, beyond my reach, are now available for purchase online. And many ancient books (and even manuscripts) previously inaccessible are now freely available online. In addition, I am thankful many employees at selling used books do not know the real value of the books they sell at a very low price.

Regardless, there was a long time were humans did not have books and an even longer time of difficult access to books. We are clearly entering a new time when books are about to become rare artifacts from the past. I wonder who will become the new mentors guiding us to read and think in this new time.

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