A DAD'S LIFE:Pictures and sounds can't match power of words
THE MS READATHON is on us again. When I say it’s on us again, I have to admit a disclaimer: the missus promotes the thing which means we’re involved from start to finish. If we don’t embrace it, there is trouble, so for these few weeks, for the elder anyway, there’s a race to wolf as many books as possible.
I’ve written about the kids reading lots of times here. I don’t care what it takes to get their noses in a book and I don’t really care what they read, within reason. If they’re swallowing words, they’re filling their minds, and if they’re taking on ideas, they’re learning to filter and assess. They’re learning to think.
If it takes a sort of competitive push to read as much as is humanly possible and raise a few quid for a charity to do this, then that is a stroke of genius by the charity.
I hear all the time about dwindling numbers of readers, but this is a gripe at least as old as me. Since the dawn of time, ie the 1970s, publishers have been threatened. First by the photocopier, then by the PC, closely followed by CDs, the rise of the internet and now a multitude of hand-held devices. The book is still here, but like the newspaper you may or may not be holding, its physical form is in flux. That is all.
The printed word is merging with sights and sounds in a way that means words on a page may well eventually become extinct, but only because they will have transformed into so much more.
The desire for a story is as ravenous in children’s minds as it has ever been, except now their experience can be enhanced, with multimedia being the accepted standard in many kids’ experience. Witness the video clip currently doing the rounds of a one year old attempting to work a magazine like an iPad before discarding it in frustration. To her the printed page is malfunctioning technology.
They grow with this level of variety as the norm, and yet they still, some of them anyway, wind up curled on a couch, engrossed. Words feed them in a way that pictures and sounds sometimes cannot. Pictures and sounds tell them the story, words allow them the privilege of picturing it themselves.
For a child, the exploration of imagination is infinite, while a movie or album has a start and finish. When they find a book that acts as a springboard for their own creative ideas, they run with it because they know the images are theirs not George Lucas’s or Matt Groening’s.
I watch movies and marvel at the skill of the direction and performances. (Occasionally. A lot of the time I watch movies and want to strangle Tom Cruise for wasting my time.) When they are good, they can inspire awe, they become touchstones for eras and places. Quote Wall Street, "Greed is good", and instantly you have a sense of 1980s America, the thirst for accumulation of wealth. But the image you sense is Oliver Stone's. Brilliant as it is, it is his and one we now all share.
Bright Lights, Big Cityby Jay McInerney or Less Than Zeroby Brett Easton Ellis also instantly conjure up images of 1980s America, but even when we share our feelings on those images with fellow readers we share separate experiences. We picture the stories differently because we relate to the way the words fell differently.
I think that’s why the younger sits up on my knee every night to “do” her reading homework with a grim set to her features. It doesn’t come easy to her, she doesn’t sound out the letters and roll them seamlessly into sentences; she has to work at it. She sits up, furrows the brow and extricates sense from the symbols.
She does this slowly, with purpose, and as the end of a sentence comes clear her face relaxes as she takes the meaning that’s being conveyed. Sometimes she laughs and it is apparent she is amazed this humour was there all along but only made itself known when she brought her attention to bear. It is buried treasure.
Reading is treasure. And when the code has been deciphered, all the books on every shelf, all the copyright now owned by Google, is suddenly a vast trove open to grasping minds. If only to feed those minds, and never mind the extra benefits, every parent and teacher should enrol their kids in the Readathon because there is nothing more buoyant than an opened mind.