Anti-Climacus

WELL: The account below is, as was pointed out in the comments, incomplete. Whence the conviction that reading will somehow provide the answers I'm looking for? Only because that was my previous experience: it matters that I had parents for whom reading was an important activity, who cultivated that sensibility and didn't let me give up on it in my early teenage years when the desire to turn to video games or sports (among other options) was strongest.

Small-but-telling anecdote #1: My brother, I believe, once remarked to the effect that he knows when he's with his family, since we're all sitting in a room reading books (100% true, that).

You get raised to read, and you read. It's not that easy; rather like being raised in the church, there comes a point when you've reached sufficient maturity that you have to decide to make it part of your identity (it's never been surprising to me that people I know change political opinions, church allegiances, literary tastes, etc, in the approximately 20-to-25 time period). There's something pleasantly upper-middle-class about that story (though there are other contexts to be drawn on: the Book-of-the-Month Club or Penguin Classics in their original identities, or the emphasis on literacy that comes from what becomes the New Testament). But two countervailing thoughts: the story isn't universal--the people involved matter. Even amongst my grad student friends, I know a fair number of people for whom books are not nearly so vital (the most-frequent remark of first-time visitors to my apartment is 'wow, you have a lot of books'). I absolutely would not be in the same position without my parents.

It's also the case that this story has to start somewhere, and this is the part I have more difficulty understanding. At some point in the history of both sides of my family, reading and education were prioritized, and my presence in grad school is the end result of the decisions all those people made. Part of Lessing's lecture is to point us back to the question: we know what the end result should be, but how do we help people to take those first steps when the spiritual and material conditions around them militate towards almost anything else as a consideration?

This last question undoubtably underlies the modern human rights movement.