On Reading

In the Vineyard of the Text:

 A Commentary to Hugh's Didascalicon 

by Ivan Illich

"Modern theories of how the universe came into being tell that an extremely delicate balance was involved. Had certain crucial temperatures and dimensions been even minutely different, the Big Bang . . . could not have occurred. The development of the modern book and of book-culture as we know it seems to have depended on a comparable fragility of crucial and interlocking factors." - George Steiner

"The duty to read -

There are many persons whose nature has left them so poor in ability that they can hardly grasp with their intellect even easy things and of these persons I believe there are two sorts. There are those who, while they are not unaware of their own dullness, nonetheless struggle after knowledge with all the effort they can put forth and who, by tirelessly keeping up their pursuit, deserve to obtain as a result of their will power what they by no means could possess as a result of their work. Others, however, because they know that they are in no way able to encompass the highest things neglect even the least and, as it were, carelessly at home in their sluggishness, they all the more lose the light of truth in the greatest matters by their refusal to learn those smallest of which they are capable."  

- Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon, from the preface, p.43.

At once medieval in its sources and modern in its message, this commentary is both one of the text and of reading culture in the modern era. With Hugh as muse and guide, Illich documents the lessons books have taught us before the pages of history are transformed to computer disks.