The Owl Has Flown

In his essay, Birkerts suggests that reading is becoming not so much a privilege, but more of a habit, and something we are surrounded by everyday. Whether it is reading signs, billboards, posters, or books, it’s in our everyday lives. He also suggests that wisdom is something that isn’t necessarily diminished, but isn’t as commonly found because readers are not taking the time to slowly read and identify on all levels, but are more apt to skim through and not take the time to let the information process. He mentions that, “if there are still wise people around us, they stay out of the spotlight because their wisdom tells them to.” I think Birkert means that the wise people stay low key and take the time to enjoy different aspects of life, where as other people take it all in at once, and don’t really appreciate it, kind of like their reading. Birkerts claims that this could be because, before the technology of television, media, and other reading sources, people were stuck with fewer amounts of reading options, and would read those over and over again and have a very clear understanding of them. In present day society, we have reading sources everywhere, the internet, advertisements, textbooks, magazines; pretty much anywhere you go, there’s a source of reading material. One implication of Birkerts’ treatment of the way he links wisdom with reading and vise versa, is that, people don’t have as much wisdom today because of something called lateral reading. This is where you’re reading something but not putting much thought to what its about; they’re reading so many different ideas, that you know certain details about different subjects, but not the main and key concepts. Where as before we were introduced to all these reading opportunities, people were more of vertical readers, because they had less sources to read so they chose to study them more intently and had a better representation of what they was about, since that was all they read. “Reading has the stronger claim to invisibility”, Birkerts says. He means that since we see it everyday, that it’s nothing new to us, but the wise will always stop and take the time to go one step beyond the norm and try to figure out what it really means. If we don’t have these wise people, how would we ever figure out the real ideas behind certain points, or why things are done certain ways?