Imlisanen Jamir
The story is always told the same way. Julius Caesar’s soldiers set fire to the harbor at Alexandria in 48 B.C.E. and the flames spread inland to the great library, taking with them the accumulated learning of the ancient world. Three centuries later, a mob loyal to the archbishop finished what the fire had started. It is a satisfying account because it gives loss a face.
Contemporary historians have grown skeptical of that story because the fire alone cannot explain what was lost. The library persisted in diminished form for centuries after Caesar. What killed it in the end was neglect that nobody in particular was responsible for. The royal subsidies that once paid scholars to live and work among the scrolls dried up. Copying slowed and scholars drifted toward Rome and Constantinople, where the patronage was better. The library stopped being fed, and something that size starves quietly.
Our relationship with reading is approaching the same kind of quiet. There has been no single event to blame it on, no ban. What exists instead is a slow withdrawal of the conditions under which reading was ever going to survive, spread out across schools, libraries, and homes in a manner that resists being pinned to any one cause and therefore resists being treated as a crisis at all.
Government schools across the state, where most children still begin their education, have libraries in the sense that a room and some shelves exist. Whether books are current, whether anyone is assigned to catalog or replenish them, whether a student can walk in during a free period and expect to find something worth reading, varies by school and mostly trends toward no. District libraries fare little better. Anyone who has visited one recently knows the newspapers are current and the reference sections are decades old, which tells you where the institutional attention actually goes.
The same pattern holds outside institutions. Households that once treated the Bible, the hymnal, and whatever devotional literature came through the church as a baseline of home reading have watched that baseline erode as churches themselves shifted toward screens for sermons and announcements. Print runs of our literature, already small because the readership was always small, have grown smaller still, and publishers who once saw a market now see a subsidy request. Writers keep writing. Whether anyone downstream is positioned to read what they produce is a separate question, and increasingly the answer is fewer people than before.
What makes this hard to write about, and harder still to organize a policy response around, is precisely what made Alexandria’s decline hard for ancient chroniclers to narrate. Multiply the aforesaid patterns across enough schools and enough years and you get a generation for whom reading was never quite established as a habit.
Optimists in an earlier era assumed literacy, once achieved, was self-sustaining, a state you reached and then kept, the way a nation reaches literacy statistics and stays above them. Alexandria’s history argues otherwise. So, on a smaller and more local scale, does the present state of reading now. Neither the library nor the habit of reading was ever a fixed achievement. Both required continuous maintenance from institutions willing to keep paying for it, and neither survives for long once that maintenance stops.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
