The importance of reading

From Teeming brain

 Soon college students all over America will be trundling to their advisers’ offices to choose a major. In this moment of financial insecurity, students are naturally drawn to economics, business, and the hard sciences. But students ought to resist the temptation of those purportedly money-ensuring options and even of history and philosophy, marvelous though they may be. All students — and I mean all — ought to think seriously about majoring in English.

. . . English majors want the joy of seeing the world through the eyes of people who — let us admit it — are more sensitive, more articulate, shrewder, sharper, more alive than they themselves are. The experience of merging minds and hearts with Proust or James or Austen makes you see that there is more to the world than you had ever imagined. You see that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense — more alive with meaning than you had thought.

Real reading is reincarnation. There is no other way to put it. It is being born again into a higher form of consciousness than we ourselves possess. When we walk the streets of Manhattan with Walt Whitman or contemplate our hopes for eternity with Emily Dickinson, we are reborn into more ample and generous minds. “Life piled on life / Were all too little,” says Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and he is right. Given the ragged magnificence of the world, who would wish to live only once? The English major lives many times through the astounding transportive magic of words and the welcoming power of his receptive imagination. The economics major? In all probability he lives but once. If the English major has enough energy and openness of heart, he lives not once but hundreds of times. Not all books are worth being reincarnated into, to be sure — but those that are win Keats’s sweet phrase: “a joy forever.”

. . . Love for language, hunger for life, openness and a quest for truth: Those are the qualities of my English major in the ideal form. But of course now we’re talking about more than a mere academic major. We’re talking about a way of life. We’re talking about a way of living that places inquiry into how to live in the world — what to be, how to act, how to move through time — at its center.

What we’re talking about is a path to becoming a human being, or at least a better sort of human being than one was at the start. An English major? To me an English major is someone who has decided, against all kinds of pious, prudent advice and all kinds of fears and resistances, to major, quite simply, in becoming a person. Once you’ve passed that particular course of study — or at least made some significant progress on your way — then maybe you’re ready to take up something else.

I have traveled the universe and never left my chair!

I have tasted exotic fruits, seen the bottom of slave ships, held the shakles within my heart.

I have felt the Caribean winds blow across my brow as I walked the oceans shores, and tasted the luscious grapes in the  south of France.

I have  have seen the night sky as I lay back in a gondola and listened to  a gondolier sing a  husky Italian ballad, and walked the  ancient cobbled streets with  the monks in a small English town.

Have held beautiful  cabochons in an Egyptian shop, glorified in the   sweet aromas of the spice houses in  Marakesh.

and never left my chair>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

laura ann wrote:I have traveled the universe and never left my chair!

I have tasted exotic fruits, seen the bottom of slave ships, held the shakles within my heart.

I have felt the Caribean winds blow across my brow as I walked the oceans shores, and tasted the luscious grapes in the  south of France.

I have  have seen the night sky as I lay back in a gondola and listened to  a gondolier sing a  husky Italian ballad, and walked the  ancient cobbled streets with  the monks in a small English town.

Have held beautiful  cabochons in an Egyptian shop, glorified in the   sweet aromas of the spice houses in  Marakesh.

and never left my chair>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 Love it

I cannot imagine a life without books.
I love them always have since a small child.
I remember I read  100 books in the fifth grade lol.

All genres from mysteries to biographies to the classics.

My fear is I will get in  old age to where I can no longer read them even with a magnifying glass.

No where near that yet but is probably one of my greatest fears in life.. more then  any disability I think.

Me too

Great post Stephen. The world is within our fingertips. 

Your post summoned me to browse the web and I found this page for kids on reading.


They have a paranormal page...........http://www.abookandahug.com/paranormal

This one book ..............Dreamland
http://abookandahug.com/paranormal-2/21888-dreamlandrileybloomseriesbookthree

overview.........
After dying in a car wreck Riley finds herself in place called Here, where the time is always Now. Finding out that the Afterlife is not just a time of leisure, she is given the job of Soul Catcher and her teacher is a boy named Bodhi. Her job is to help lost souls find their way across the bridge toward the next step of their afterlife.
Riley has helped many souls cross over who have been in the Afterlife for a long time. Now she is ready for a break and wants to contact her sister Ever back on Earth by entering her dreams.
She goes to the place where dreams can happen and ends up meeting the director who tells her that you can enter dreams two ways. You can be a Dream Jumper or you can be a Dream Weaver. However, Dream Weaving was outlawed years ago but, seeing it as her only option, she sets out to find the deserted studio where they used to happen.
While there she meets a ghost boy who loves to create and send nightmares to people. To be able to get to her sister, she will have to confront him and overcome some of own fears.


Paranormal - for 14 and up readers
published in 2011 - wish they had it when I was a kid.  

Such an interesting topic.     I have travelled in my dreams.     Visions I have never seen before.....

Spirit is a wonderful place.....

Joan xx