[gallery] Thomas Aquinas’s handwriting.. See more at Language Log
A new journalistic recipe is afoot: find once ubiquitous technology that is on the wane and write about its quirky history. The latest exhibit at the LA Review of Books: the phone booth.Ah, the phone booth, haven of bacterial infestation, coin-operated dysfunctionality, and cinematic obsession. We’ll miss you.
Of course the more interesting question is not to treat media like cats (so cute, so sad), but to ask why it is that we need to rehearse these disappearances. Why are we so drawn to the mourning work of missing media?
We have gone long enough without raising the question of whether reading makes you a better person. The short answer to that question is No. It doesn’t. And the long answer doesn’t differ too dramatically from the short one….Responding to the claim that not just reading but “high culture” in general is morally improving, Terry Eagleton points out that, during World War II, “many people were indeed deep in high culture, but … this had not prevented some of them from engaging in such activities as superintending the murder of Jews in central Europe.” If reading really was supposed to “make you a better person,” then “when the Allied troops moved into the concentration camps … to arrest commandants who had whiled away their leisure hours with a volume of Goethe, it appeared that someone had some explaining to do.”
There’s simply nothing about reading, or listening to Mozart sonatas, or viewing paintings by Raphael, that necessarily transforms or even improves someone’s character. As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, “A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.” Nevertheless, I am going to argue, from time to time throughout the course of this book, that if you really want to become a better person, there are ways in which reading can help. But the degree to which that happens will depend not just on what you read … but also why and how. So consider yourself either warned or promised, according to your feelings about moralistic exhortation.
Just to relax, his poor tired limbs on a restful bed.
Just to relax, his aching heart on a restful bed.
For his head, above all, to be still. It goes on far too long, that head of his. And he calls it work when his head goes on like that.
And his thoughts, no, for what he calls his thoughts.
For his ideas to be still and no longer shake about in his head like seeds in a pumpkin.
Like a rattle made from an empty pumpkin.
When one sees what they are, the things he calls his ideas.
Poor creature. I do not like, God says, the man who doesn’t sleep.
The kind who burns in his bed from anxiety and fever. I am in favour, God says, of people examining their conscience, every evening.
It is a good exercise.
But then, you mustn’t torture yourself to the point of losing your sleep.
At that hour the day is done and well done; there is no doing it over again.
There is no going back on it.
Those sins which trouble you so much, my boy, well, it was very simple.
My friend, you ought not to have committed them.
At the time when you could still not commit them.
At present, it is over, go, sleep, to-morrow you will not begin them again.
But the man who goes to bed making plans for the morrow,
Is the one I do not like, God says.
The fool, does he even know what to-morrow will be like?
Does he even know what the weather will be?
He would do better to say his prayers.
It’s not just that a countercultural embrace of sleep bears witness to values higher than “the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desire for other things.” A night of good sleep—a week, or month, or year of good sleep—also testifies to the basic Christian story of Creation. We are creatures, with bodies that are finite and contingent. For much of Western history, the poets celebrated sleep as a welcome memento mori, a reminder that one day we will die: hence Keats’s ode to the “sweet embalmer” sleep, and Donne’s observation, “Natural men have conceived a twofold use of sleep; that it is a refreshing of the body in this life; that it is a preparing of the soul for the next.” Is it any surprise that in a society where we try to deny our mortality in countless ways, we also deny our need to sleep?The unarguable demands that our bodies make for sleep are a good reminder that we are mere creatures, not the Creator. For it is God and God alone who “neither slumbers nor sleeps.” Of course, the Creator has slept, another startling reminder of the radical humility he embraced in becoming incarnate. He took on a body that, like ours, was finite and contingent and needed sleep. To push ourselves to go without sleep is, in some sense, to deny our embodiment, to deny our fragile incarnations—and perhaps to deny the magnanimous poverty and self-emptying that went into his Incarnation.