From Neil Gaiman's essay, "Why Our Future Depends on Libraries, Reading, and Daydreaming" ...
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.
I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.
We have an obligation to support libraries. To use
libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of
libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or
culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are
damaging the future.
We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read
them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do
the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just
because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading aloud time as bonding
time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the
world are put aside.
We have an obligation to use the language. To push
ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate
clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to
pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a
living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and
pronunciations to change with time.
We writers - and especially writers for children, but all
writers - have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true
things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not
exist in places that never were - to understand that truth is not in what
happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells
the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to
make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader,
after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we
must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour
and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green
world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force
predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats like adult birds
feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never,
ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children to read that we
would not want to read ourselves.
We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that
as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up
and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we've
lessened our own future and diminished theirs.
We all - adults and children, writers and readers - have an
obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend
that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is
huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of
rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and
over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can
be different.
Neil Gaiman
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