Few are the cure-alls available to us in the gardens between.
Gummies and TM, cold plunging and the baptism of ideologies — these and more are proffered by experts and idiots alike. The perennial tradition recommends the wisdom and pursuit of union in whatever forms we can tranquilly enter into it. Eastern traditions recommend a path through the self that utilizes what is always available to us: our inner being. The Christian tradition rejects plurality and prescribes one cure.
In every form they take, purpose-seeking activities of religions, ideologies, power structures, and liberationists agree on one thing: there is a disease.
Depending on your beliefs about the spiritual–material space, this conviction takes different forms. This was true in sixteenth-century, enchanted Russia, where pestilence and political entities were endowed with demonic corruption. It was true in twentieth-century America, which saw the satanic lurking behind toy companies and fictional series. In another community, science is elevated to analyze the sociological, biological, and historical elements that contribute to our current predicament — naming structures and systems ripe for corruption and bent toward the disease’s flourishing.
In all cases, the sickness seems to remain, and social conversation spreads a deep sadness, fear, and mistrust about the state of the world in every era…
A life of reading counteracts the malformation of screen and digital technology. It acts as an antidote to the bad habits of consumerism, utilitarianism, individualism, and other wayward “-isms.” In contrast to many other pastimes, reading demands engagement. It asks something of the participant. It cultivates the imagination and increases a person’s vision of the world.
While people argue that reading is not a cure-all, no one believes reading is bad. No one doubts that reading — even if it cannot make a person good — can make a person better…
The case for reading has always been strong, its champions numerous and diverse (from leaders of the Civil Rights Movement like Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King Jr., to American traditionalists like Charles Dickens and Thomas Jefferson).
Yet never before has it seemed so perfectly poised as an antidote to the intoxication of our time…
Read for the same reason people have read — and shared poems or stories — for thousands of years: because our eyes are not enough by which to see. The time and place in which we live blind us to other perspectives and ways of being not our own. We read because we have been given the gift of imagination and intellect, and we exhibit our gratitude by using it.
~ Jessica Hooten Wilson, Reading for the Love of God