Creeping dimness:

...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey CREEPING DIMNESS WHEN THE PAST IS MARGINALIZED I have been thinking about moving to another city, which means looking around our house and seeing how much there is to move or give away...

...That can be done with old photos, a lot of story telling, or the presence in the house of an older relative who is an active part of the family's life...

...Powers recently offered the opinion that people are more stupid than they used to be, and as misanthropic as that may sound, there seems to be evidence for what he says...

...It was probably good for them whether they liked it or not...

...It had another effect, something which only became clear to me in the context of recent complaints about the closing of the American mind, cultural illiteracy, and creeping dimness...

...Growing up in that environment made me a lover, or anyway a de-vourer, of books and magazines...

...This is mildly depressing, where the taste of the people in such homes is concerned, but it is culturally disastrous when you consider what it says about the continuity of a culture...

...This comes about almost genetically...

...In too many cases, it isn't even marginal...

...man-in-the-street interviewees respond with depressing thickness to stupid questions...

...but so are our homes...

...I think the real reason for all of this is that television acts on the brain roughly the way marijuana does: it focuses your attention to the moment, and prolonged use leads to short-term, and eventually long-term, memory loss...

...I've come to the depressing conclusion that, given the choice, most people will choose numbness and distraction over all other possibilities...

...In any case, this race brings to mind Mort Sahl's observation that the history of the American presidency is a disproof of the theory of evolution...

...So when I was in grade school and a long illness forced me to read seriously, since there wasn't much else to do, some of the books available to me were written by authors popular before and during World War II...

...Throwing away a hardcover book, no matter how awful it is, strikes me as vaguely sinful...

...George Bush's curiously revisionist view of Pearl Harbor could be the result of too much TV...

...I looked at Bill Mauldin's wartime "Willie and Joe cartoons...

...or if there are books they are very recent, and likely to be of the inspirational or self-help variety...

...The ignorance perpetuated by teachers and school systems is a reflection of the ignorance of society in general...

...There have been some complaints about this, but the media go on reporting what the polls say about who is ahead, with few serious explorations of either candidate's fitness for office...

...This may be close to superstition, but it is a feeling I am sure I share with many readers...

...The hawkishness of some young people is, similarly, grounded in an ignorance of what happened during the time of the war in Vietnam...

...The result of all this is that during the late fifties and early sixties I had some sense, however dated and filtered, of what my parents' generation had gone through, what they found interesting, what they cared most about...

...I read books, plays, and poems by people like Norman Corwin, Clifford Odets, and Louis MacNeice...

...So were people on both sides of the family...

...The lack of real substance in this year's campaign makes the Reagan-Mondale race look like Madison versus Hamilton...

...Once, visiting my mother's father, I found an old paperback edition of Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake in a small sunny room with a wall full of books...

...In a Mother Jones column some months ago, Roger Wilkins argued that the reason for the rise in racism among young people, a rise demonstrated by racist incidents on several college campuses, was a profound ignorance of history...

...I grew up in a house full of books, all kinds of books, and part of the reason was that my father was a publisher...

...So was my mother...

...It isn't a class phenomenon so much as it is the result of a society which moves around a lot and thus disposes of objects which other, more stable societies would retain...

...That night, in a paneled room upstairs, next to an old cathedral radio, I stayed up late and read, and felt that my life would be changed forever by the voice of Philip Marlowe...

...us a wider world...

...What is worrisome is the absolute dominance of the present in so many homes, and the absence of any shared past...

...One compelling bit of evidence is the nature of the current presidential campaign, a proof, if one were needed, that you can't underestimate the intelligence of the American people...

...They last, they hang around...

...A lot of young people are simply unaware that black Americans had to struggle, sometimes to the death, for civil rights...

...This leads to keeping books for decades, something my parents did...

...In a similar way, the absence of TV, VCR's, and the rest forced people to read, talk with one another, and remember...

...this, combined with a relentless and largely media-driven compulsion to worry most about the new, whatever it may be, makes a concern with the novels and essays, or for that matter the spoken memories, of an older generation marginal...

...In an interview with the New York Times, novelist J.F...

...One thing about books: they are objects, like lamps, ashtrays, vases...

...In the old days the absence of car radios, combined with the time it took to get from one place to another, forced a kind of solitude and silence on people...

...I am not at all sure that it was a happier way of living, but it did do something to connect one generation with another, and it gave us a wider world...

...This is a trap worth avoiding, and the choice of books as a focus here- important as they are to me, and have been to my family-is not so much the point as the fact that books were a way of connecting one generation to another, or passing on a history which, because of the way it was passed on, is shared...

...there was a sense of recognition and connection...

...I realize that one particular sin many families commit is to perpetuate the notion that the way they did things was superior to the way all those other people do things...

...My brothers and sisters and I wound up being people whose reading was nearly compulsive: we'd read cereal boxes if a newspaper wasn't handy at the breakfast table...

...I have been in some homes where there are no books at all, homes where the television set dominates the living room...

...Our schools are largely responsible for this...

...The thing I seem to have most of is books...

...Even tattered paperbacks, with brittle yellow pages turning to brown, pages that flake away as you read them, tend to be kept forever...

...When I saw movies from the forties they seemed dated, of course, but at the same time there was something alive there for me, because of the books I'd read at home...

...The more important reason the books were there (and no doubt the reason my father became a publisher) was that he was a reader...