to advance his interests, or become a better person. About the only functional gain, (though The New York Times, in a recent advertising campaign, proclaimed that reading it would help one to “be more interesting”) the reader gets out of them is practice in reading. And even this is a doubtful advantage. Times’s educated people read too many irrelevant words—irrelevant, that is, to any thoughtful idea of their personal interests, either narrow (practical) or broad (cultural). Imagine a similar person of, say the sixteenth century confronted with a copy of Time or The New York Times. He would take a whole day to master it, perhaps two, because he would be accustomed to take the time to think and even to feel about what he read; and he could take the time because there was time, there being comparatively little to read in that golden age. (The very name of Luce’s magazine is significant: Time, just because we don’t have it.) Feeling a duty—or perhaps simply a compulsion—at least to glance over the printed matter that inundates us daily, we have developed of necessity a rapid, purely rational, classifying habit of mind, something like the operations of a Mark IV calculating machine, making a great many small decisions every minute: read or not read? If read, then take in this, skim over that, and let the rest go by. This we do with the surface of our minds, since we “just don’t have time” to bring the slow, cumbersome depths into play, to ruminate, speculate, reflect, wonder, experience what the eye flits over. This gives a greatly extended coverage to our minds, but also makes them, compared to the kind of minds similar people had in past centuries, coarse, shallow, passive, and unoriginal. Such reading habits have produced a similar kind of reading matter, since, except for a few stubborn old-fashioned types—the handcraftsmen who produce whatever is written today of quality, whether in poetry, fiction, scholarship or journalism—our writers produce work that is to be read quickly and then buried under the next day’s spate of “news” or the next month’s best seller; hastily slapped-together stuff which it would be foolish to waste much time or effort on either writing or reading. For those who, as readers or as writers, would get a little under the surface, the real problem of our day is how to escape being “well informed,” how to resist the temptation to acquire too much information (never more seductive than when it appears in the chaste garb of duty), and how in general to elude the voracious demands on one’s attention enough to think a little. The problem is as acute in the groves of Academe as in the profane world of journalism—one has only to consider the appalling mass of words available in any large college library on any topic of scholarly interest (that is, now that the “social sciences” have so proliferated, on any topic). The amount of verbal pomposity, elaboration of the obvious, repetition, trivia, low-grade statistics, tedious factification, drudging recapitulations of the half comprehended, and generally inane and laborious junk that one encounters suggests that the thinkers of earlier ages had one decisive advantage over those of today: they could draw on very little research.
If the kind of curiosity Time exploits is not functional, neither is it exactly “idle” (which implies a kind of leisurely enjoyment). It is, rather, a nervous habit. As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them, Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking. This sort of mental indulgence—most of the daily papers should also be included—is considered a sensible use of time, as against “wasting” it on movies or detective stories. Only the honorific status of science can explain why the enjoyment of trivial and debased art products is looked down on while acquiring data in similarly trivial and debased forms is thought admirable.
A friend of mine complained to her eight-year-old child’s teacher that fairy tales, myths, and other kinds of imaginative literature had been almost eliminated