30.EPILOGUE.73: December 23, 2003
-- INFINITY.
INTERLUDE FOUR:
"The Sickness."
In the late 18th Century and also in the 19th Century, just when the novel was taking off, it was believed that widespread literacy and novel-reading would generate in increase in madness-- particularly among women, but men were also not exempt. This is because the act of reading presupposes types of visualization, and the fear was that individuals would become addicted to, or otherwise susceptible to, the "hallucinations" produced in the brain by the act of processing written data into images. The fear was that enormous groups of readers would slowly become unable to make distinctions between the "real world" and the worlds they themselves generated in their own minds, through increased exposure to written text. This fear nicely compliments another fear regarding literacy that erupted centuries earlier. This earlier fear centred around the idea that reading was, in some way, a type of "possession" of one person by the mind of another. Through reading, the reader would be exposed to a kind of ghostly presence, or an image of the writer's intelligence which would inhabit the reader's mind, polluting him, changing him in unforeseen and horrible ways. Of course, this was associated with demonic possession and thus was one of the reasons that only priests were allowed to achieve literacy. The theory being that only someone who lived near the divine wisdom of God would be strong enough, smart enough, and well-enough trained enough to resist the temptations and evils of texts produced by forces and individuals that were less than holy....They say the heart of rock and roll is still beating. And from what I've seen, I believe it!
--Torquemada.
Next: Sitting alone.....