…become readers of any and everything: newspapers, magazines, Harlequin romances, detective stories, as well as novels and plays and poems. For reading is itself a moral act. As George Will once said, there is more imaginative life to be found in reading any cheap thriller than in watching the most sophisticated film. He is not dismissing the cinema, but simply pointing out that it forms images for us, and thus threatens to make us dependent on such previously-formed depictions.
Words on a page, by contrast, require us to turn them into images and ideas, and thus to habituate our minds to thinking about something other than ourselves. Reading is thus an intrinsically moral act. This leads to my second plea: I remind my students that, without such thoughtfulness, we are not likely to cultivate an inward life of critique and assessment, of prayer and contemplation, and thus of a truly human existence.