Mary Hammerbeck
English 100 M
1/24/10
In "The Owl Has Flown" by Sven Birkerts, the idea of reading and writing being almost totally invisible is a big theme in the beginning of the essay. Birkerts asks this question, "How do people experience the written word, and how have those experiences, each necessarily unique, changed in larger collective ways down the centuries?" This question makes me think about how I experience the written word in this century and how I use these so called "invisible" methods of conveying and understanding information in the modern world. Back in times such as the 7th century, reading was mostly done aloud and easy to prove that reading is possible and a valid form of conveying information. With the development of mass printed text, silent reading to ones self became more and more popular and changed what people referred to as reading into a silent indistinguishable form of learning information from a text. Birkerts hints that writing is a more valid way to keep history and that reading isn't valid but many people can disagree. When it comes to physical proof of something, writing is the way to go, but something is said for a story passed down verbally through generations of families and ending up in our generation. That one story that started centuries ago is now here to interpret and find out the hidden history of the past.
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