The importance of Reading, Books and Libraries (Doris Lessing)
Posted by Ingrid Thomson | 13 Dec, 2008Spotted in the latest issue of The Big Issue (12 Dec 2008 - 23 Jan 2009 #141 Vol 12, p 20).
In 2007, Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On the evening of the awards ceremony, all recipients give a public lecture. The Big Issue have reproduced the text of the lecture, which is also available from the Nobel Prize website (as a pdf).
Quoting:-
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and our great store of literature. Of course, we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the founding of working men's libraries and institutes, the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Reading, books, used to be part of a general education.
Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less. And if children cannot read, it is because they have not read.
And further on in the lecture:-Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books.
There is the gap. There is the difficulty.
I have been looking at the speeches by some of your recent prizewinners. Take the magnificent Pamuk. He said his father had 500 books. His talent did not come out of the air, he was connected with the great tradition.
Take V.S. Naipaul. He mentions that the Indian Vedas were close behind the memory of his family. His father encouraged him to write, and when he got to England he would visit the British Library. So he was close to the great tradition.
Let us take John Coetzee. He was not only close to the great tradition, he was the tradition: he taught literature in Cape Town. And how sorry I am that I was never in one of his classes, taught by that wonderfully brave, bold mind.
In order to write, in order to make literature, there must be a close connection with libraries, books, with the Tradition.