История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 137 стр.

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her childhood library in Antigua, explained that her intention was not to steal; it

was “just that once I had read a book I couldn’t bear to part with it.”

Miss Lebach must have known that her employees pilfered books, but I

suspect that, as long as she felt we did not exceed certain unspoken limits, she

would allow the crime. Once or twice she saw me engrossed in a new arrival, and

merely told me to get on with my work and to keep the book and read it at home,

on my own time.

I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical

progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.

The progression of my reading never followed the conventional sequence of time.

For instance, reading something out loud to somebody that I had read before on my

own modified those earlier readings, widened my memory of them, made me

perceive what I had not perceived at the time but seemed to recall now, triggered

by the person’s response.

And now I ambitiously proceed from my history of a reader to the history of

the act of reading, or rather to a history of reading. Any such history must be only

one of many, however impersonal it may try to be. Ultimately, perhaps, the history

of reading is the history of each of its readers.

First, we, today’s readers, have yet to learn what reading is. Our future – the

future of the history of our reading – was explored by Saint Augustine, who tried

to distinguish between the text seen in the mind and the text spoken out loud; by

Dante, who questioned the limits of the reader’s power of interpretation; by Lady

Murasaki, who argued for the specificity of certain readings; by Pliny, who

analyzed the performance of reading; by Sumerian scribes, who imbued the act of

reading with political power; by the first makers of books, who found the methods

of scroll-reading (like the methods we now use on our computers) too limiting and

cumbersome, and offered us instead the possibility of flipping pages.

Like the act of reading itself, a history of reading jumps forward to our time

– to me, to my experience as a reader- and then goes back to an early page in a

distant foreign century.