State of Mexico /
At the end of The Republic, Plato concludes his political plan by pointing out the need to expel from the polis two types of people whom he considers a human and political burden: the poets—in particular Archilochus, whom he suggests beating—and the forgetful. But it does not refer only to those with daily forgetfulness, but to those who, according to Plato, trust their memory in books. Already in the maturity of the Roman Empire, Epictetus expresses a more explicit reproach towards those who, by entrusting all their knowledge to books, generate a deficiency in their memory. Later, in the 19th century, Schopenhauer, true to his bitter lucidity, criticized his colleagues for their inability to observe the world and its problems, preferring to keep their noses buried in books. This reproach is not very different from that raised by Michel de Montaigne in his essay On Pedantry: the problem is not only the dependence on books to the detriment of memory, but also the pedantry and false erudition that can arise from reading. Because neither erudition is necessarily knowledge nor is pedantry a value.
Today, Plato’s reproach could be applied to the classroom of practically any educational level, where teachers regret that their students place all their trust in smartphones, consume messages of a few words on social networks or video blogs and, consequently, have difficulties to read a complete technical text fluently and comprehensively. Although classicists longed for their students to be able to recite the Iliad from memory without resorting to written crutches, the sentiment behind this criticism is similar. Depriving ourselves of books, as well as the exercise of our memory, especially historical memory, is equivalent to voluntarily renouncing one of the richest, most vivid and real facets of human experience.
It is real because, since Plato, we know that poetry is not a lie, but rather exalted, exaggerated, very vivid beauty. This fictitious beauty, created with words, enriches our ordinary reality, making it luminous and profound. Thus, our complaint is not against the fragility of memory that books could symbolize, but quite the opposite. Today, books are a bastion of historical memory. The complexity of our relationship with them—whether greater or lesser than it was one thousand or fifteen hundred years ago—reflects the human mystery that books, as objects and cultural works, represent. Books call to us when they are prohibited and repel us when they are imposed. We take ownership of those who tell our story, but we resent those who exclude or mark us. Books can guide us, motivate us, or sometimes make us lose ourselves. Depriving ourselves of books is equivalent to depriving ourselves of a very pleasant form of happiness.
It is necessary to reorganize reading training programs from more open perspectives and adapted to the attention and concentration patterns of our time, since books are not one-dimensional objects. Reading does not necessarily make us better people nor, as Montaigne rightly pointed out, does it make us more intelligent. However, it allows us to develop human capacities, broaden horizons and find in this internal dialogue values that enrich our sensitivity. Perhaps, then, the starting point for reading is to ask ourselves: what do we want or need to say to ourselves? A question that only the virtuoso of memory can answer with some clarity.
