История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 135 стр.

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A HISTORY OF READING

ALBERTO MANGUEL

“A delightfully wide-ranging, beguiling study of a small daily miracle”

Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph

WE ARE ALL READERS

All people are readers, and the pleasure, responsibility and power they

derive from reading, are common to all.

I am not alone.

I first discovered that I could read at the age of four. What that word was on

the long-past billboard I no longer know, but the impression of suddenly being able

to comprehend what before I could only gaze at is as vivid today as it must have

been then. It was like acquiring an entirely new sense, so that now certain things

no longer consisted merely of what my eyes could see, my ears could hear, my

tongue could taste, my nose could smell, my fingers could feel, but of what my

whole body could decipher, translate, give voice to, read.

Reading is the craft of deciphering and translating signs. Some of these

readings are coloured by the knowledge that the thing read was created for this

specific purpose by other human beings – music notation or road signs, for

instance – or by the gods – the tortoise shell, the sky at night. Others belong to

chance.

And yet, in every case, it is the reader who reads the sense; it is the reader

who grants or recognizes in an object, place or event a certain possible readability.

It is the reader who must attribute meaning to a system of signs, and then decipher

it. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read.

Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.

I didn’t learn to write until much later, until I was seven. I could perhaps live

without writing. I don’t think I could live without reading. Reading – I discovered