The anecdotal evidence is in. The internet screws up our ability to read. Well, at least for those of us who do our factoid recovery mode forty hours a week, more or less, by leaping and skimming - a.k.a. 'surfing' - on the internet.
            Ah! What a tragedy! The mind is an unconscionable thing to mush.
            Etc. Etc.

            Let me share one of my preferred sayings:

                        Practice alters a person's inclination.
                        If kept up for a long time, it alters his inmost being.

                                                    Hsun Tzu

            I've largely forgotten who Hsun Tzu is, other than that he was not quite as ancient and not quite as famous as Confucius, at least for us westerners.

            But perhaps I should point out that we were not born reading. Reading is an acquired - a learned - skill. And the reality is that what is generally classed as 'literacy' in this culture - the ability to read 'at a certain level' - is not legitimate literacy at a cultural level. And I am not referring here, necessarily, to 'cultural literacy'. I am referring to the ability to read in the focused and sustained way that involves what I might call 'complete awareness of the text'. By this, I do not mean total recall, by any means. But I mean an ability to read the text with an intensity that if one picks it up at any page ten or twenty years later, one will recognize almost immediately that one has read it.
            Very few people read with this intensity. I know from experience that one can not only graduate from college, but one can graduate with honors from a literary major, and still not be able to read with this kind of sustained and focused intensity. Like the basics of reading itself, reading with this intensity is an acquired skill.

            In part, it is the result of an eclectic and ungoverned pattern of reading. But it may also be the consequence of a defect. Lately I have come to wonder if I am not at least slightly dyslexic. I still have to (silently) sound every word when I read. Perhaps it's the mark of the poet, since, for the legitimate poet, the sound of the language is an imperative. To lose the sound is to lose the poetry. Perhaps the reading habits of the society at large explain the bulk of anti-poetry that passes for poetry nowadays. But that may also draw down from the 'art is ugliness' philosophy that seems to dominate and radiate from the small island in the Hudson. In any case, one has watched the growing cultural acceptance of 'speed reading' from the Kennedy publicity for Evelyn Wood to the present dominated by the 'net.
            There is no doubt that deadline writing under factoid search on the net results in a flash-bang consciousness akin to that of a five year old watching Sesame Street. What fascinates me is that our anecdotal writer is not acknowledging that he has lost the sustained reading power required to absorb the unabridged Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He says he has lost the ability or the taste for all sustained reading. As a consequence, one wonders just how sustained his original power of reading was. Precisely what purpose did it serve? If he was a reader always reading as a writer under deadline, perhaps it's not surprising that the altered mode alters his perception of how he reads. But I would suggest that what he has lost is the hunter's patience for the elusive creature. If his blind is on the flight path and the ducks are always landing, he no longer needs the farmboy's patience at the pasture pond. He was never engaged in sustained and focused reading. He was always just waiting for the significant factoid.

            And, of course, this is what they teach at school, finally. The better students quickly learn what the given professor expects them to read for. But there are generic principles in any case. In literature, we look for the turning points of character and plot, the moments of vivid or - even better - of epigrammatic or capsule description, and so on and so forth. The same holds true in almost every field. We don't read. We search. What the internet does is dispense with the pointless dry ground between the significant factoids, the testable oases. In other words, we have not lost a certain ability to read. We have found the substitute for extended reading that we were always searching for, the personalized, the interactive, Clifford Notes.

            All of this would be pointless if I did not have some ulterior motive in bringing it up.
            Elitism, when it comes to culture, is not an ideology or political or socio-economic orientation. It is simply a fact. Go read the wonderful epistolary dialectic between the conservative and the radical engaged shapers of the American federation in their old-age letters, discussing their ultimate consensus on the 'natural aristocracy'.
            I have a notion that the TV foray into the 'lifestyles of the rich and famous' folded up in part because of the uniformity of the pretension. 'The very rich are not like you and me,' wrote Fitzgerald. And Hemingway said, 'Yeah, they have more money'. But then the old Dr. Hemingstein was well on his way to inordinate wealth, and the same cocooning and pretension that always go with it, including the cocooning in his addiction that probably caused his death. The arrogance and pretension of the wealthy, of whatever generation, are incredibly predictable and boring, only fit to delude the poorer students in the lower forms at boarding schools. What it tells us is that the rich have no better idea why they are rich, finally, than we do. But, of course, since we place such a great false value on wealth, the wealthy have to live the part, don't they?
            But cultural aristocrats are real and unpredictable. Not a few are insufferably arrogant, at least for those who have no clue how to approach them. We are so saturated with education, we have forgotten how to be students. But the system itself is part of the problem. When freshmen are encouraged to critique their peer's work, what we get is not connoisseurship, but dysfunction. And so those who have actually attained some level of legitimate mastery have done so outside any identifiable framework, whatever their outward career. Getting close to such a teacher, one discovers a peculiar melding of arrogance and humility, since the only way to attain mastery is through true study, a path of absolute, inward humility. But evincing mastery in a culture that venerates drones invites aesthetic and intellectual murderers.

            Legitimate reading is not a skill we can lose. But it seems to me that now that the typical student has lost the incentive to develop the skill, we should celebrate rather than bemoan the fact. Our schools do not teach us how to read in this cultural sense. It is only something the individual can develop - in this society, at least - as a consequence of a personal vocational impulse - vocation being equated with a creative personal development that commonly eschews the concept of 'job'. With our locked-in system of accreditation, it is not altogether clear how we can convert this fugitive condition for mastery into something simultaneously systematic and anti-institutional. But the defection of the non-readers may begin to clear the field.