Editor’s note: The Pleasure of Reading

History has unfolded erratically with hiccups, jumps, and retreats. Historians paint a picture that is way too bright, way too smooth, stamped with a retrospective aura of inevitability that does not reflect the haphazardness of the events. Just think, ALL the issues that were on the table two hundred years ago are still afflicting us.

Two centuries ago Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot and the encyclopedists established a corpus of ideas, a period later dubbed as the Age of Enlightenment. They were part of a greater surge (not to be confused with the ‘surge’ of the American troop in Iraq) of philosophers, humanists, scientists, artists and poets advocating social reforms in defense of civil liberties, public education and equal rights for women and men of all races. They vehemently criticized the Catholic Church and supported freedom of religion in a secular state, abolishing protectionism in favor of free trade. They sprung up everywhere, resting on the shoulders of earlier innovators and opening the way to the next generations. The few, by social contagion, became many, and the French and American revolutions ignited a process of democratization. Many of these warriors for a more just society did not die of natural causes. They were unceremoniously beheaded or killed by former friends or political opponents, ironically often in the name of the same principles of tolerance and equality they fought to achieve.

   And today, should we complain? We have never had so many people with a college degree … yet, the Defense budget dwarfs that of Education. From today’s perspective, the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ should be renamed the ‘Burst of Reason’. And although science took the place of religion at center-stage, the human attribute of intelligence still seems rather poorly served or, at best, a quite elusive component of our time. Maybe that’s why we tend to rewrite our past or interpret the present according to a narrative, imposing an arbitrary ‘a posteriori’ logic. Could be it our antidote to a ‘cupio dissolvi’ — I long to be dissolved, to a world of randomness beyond our control and our capacity for abstract thinking? We are retrofitters of reality in order to synchronize it with the emotional content and our interpretation of our experience. We categorize, cluster, and simplify complexity, obstinately trying to confirm the little we know instead of dwelling in what we don’t.

   Or better expressed by Nassim N. Taleb, author of ‘The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable’ — “Alas, we are not manufactured, in our current edition of the human race, to understand abstract matters – we need context. Randomness and uncertainty are abstractions. We respect what has happened, ignoring what could have happened. In other words, we are naturally shallow and superficial – and we do not know it. This is not a psychological problem; it comes from the main property of information. The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort.”

   And wherever we turn, we bump into the philistines of fashionable, superficial, non-real culture. Nietzsche coined for them the term ‘Bildungsphilister’. Their dull, boring, voguish, dogmatic views dominate today’s media, academe, politics and economy. Consequently immense amounts of energy are spent repackaging, in flashy new attire, stale food with expired ‘sell-by’ dates. A liberal sprinkling of spices hides the green mold and the absence of nutrients. We find ourselves in a crowded trans-national supermarket, where the smiling faces of Berlusconi, Putin, or Bush, from giant screens, encourage us to take advantage of a Take-3-Pay-for-2 cultural sale.

   It is like being in a library consisting only of book jackets, wondering who has stolen the books. An apparent user-friendly pressure to belong — facebook, wikipedia, f-k — no questions asked about the authenticity of the source, contaminates us. Pseudo culture, fast and dirty, the easier the better. But what about the time and sustained effort necessary to brew subjective experiences and assimilated information into our personal culture? There are two sides to the question ‘who has stolen the books?’ The first, almost rhetorical, is that those in power, more than everybody else, consistently rewrite history to impose their vision and values on the world. The second is that at one time we, distracted or just lazy, allowed others to take away our valued books. In that decisive moment, we lost precious beacons, our map, to orient ourselves in a complex society. And the high tempo of the 21st century has induced us to prefer the synthesis to the original, a pre-chewed insipid substance easy to metabolize. Then soon we begin to lose our teeth and are condemned to eat baby food.

Books have lost ground to television, computer games and the internet. Independent scientific studies find strong evidence that overexposure to computer games and television induces in school-aged children a significant decline of memory performance, alteration of sleep patterns, attention deficit disorders, obsessive-addictive behavior, and reduced social interaction. How many of them do we have in our families? I belong to the baby boomer generation, in which books instead of television have been the daily staple. My reading adventures started early. Not yet a teenager, I had already been with Huckleberry Finn on the Mississippi river, or with Buck, a sledge dog, in the Klondike, in the slums of London with David Copperfield, on a deserted island with Robinson Crusoe, battling for survival, a pirate with a wooden leg drinking rum over a coffin in search of a treasure. My empire was unlimited, identifying as I did with the characters of my books — Robin Hood, Sancho Panza or Sherlock Holmes. Later, as a teenager, I discovered that Science Fiction could propel me into worlds of fantastic human and technological achievements. Time and space travels, encounters with other species, messages from other galaxies, black holes, I become a robot that could dream of electric sheep … all of this inoculated in me a passion for science that has never left. The BOOKazine is a continuation of a child’s dream. A collection of little windows where you peak into the lives of artists, designers, architects, entrepreneurs who are shaping the episteme of our time, and thus our future.

   Now our bookazine of 200 pages, lighter in weight but not in substance, is easier to read while in bed, or traveling, or just to be mailed to a friend. In this ‘Fall’ volume, more food for thought, something worth keeping. Read why the legendary conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim is a short-term pessimist about the Israeli-Palestinian situation, but a long-term optimist. Follow around the world the architectural ground-breaking footprints of the Norwegian Snøhetta, or discover how Frank Gehry has created an acoustic miracle within a titanium cloud with the construction of the Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College not far from New York City. Feast on the creative drives of one of the most versatile design ensembles — the Scandinavian trio Claesson-Koivisto-Rune. Or shift to a bubblier theme and learn how our reporter got ‘Champagne’ as her second name, one night in Paris. How about putting yourself in the seat of director or scriptwriter, to experience the struggle of wills between these roles in filmmaking? Or would you like to ask some good questions about the forthcoming USA presidential elections to Bill Schneider, CNN’s senior political analyst?

   And much more! Just take the Bookazine boat into uncharted waters where women and men think, act and create outside the box. They oftentimes refreshingly challenge our habits and way of thinking.

And share a book with your children, just for fun.

Pio Barone Lumaga, Editor-in-Chief

Stockholm September 10th, 2008