Reading Is a Vital Part of the Handel Seminar

In the blog entries, Those Handel Friends, I am bringing some of the characters from my book The Handel Letters to life again, along with some newer characters, in a continuing endeavor to see what our thinking about Handel and his times might inspire in us today.

From Katherine:  Please remember that I warned I would be the dominant voice for a while at the start of this reconstitution of the Handel Seminar group. Mostly I am hoping to hear from enough of you in our former and now emerging group to settle into a more equally shared routine. Meanwhile, let me say a bit more about the mode of communication I have chosen for our group.  I have chosen to post things on our former editor’s website.  She has agreed to this. I will also send out emails to our group—that is, to all who choose to send me an email address.  Why have I not chosen to do a podcast or some other quick and oral means of communication? I like writing, and I believe it is important. 

I recently read an article in The Atlantic (yes, I still get the hard copy of the magazine).  The title of the article is “The Age of Reading Is Over,” and the author is a young writer named Rose Horowitch.  Helpfully, she includes a little information about herself in the article.  She writes, “I was raised in the postliterate era.  I was born shortly after the dot-com bubble burst and entered first grade around the time the iPhone was released.” The article is well worth reading.  One point she makes that sticks with me even now is that our abandoning reading (and non-AI writing) “comes at the expense of mental development.” In other words, we are losing something that from an early age taught us HOW to use our own brains to think. We are losing one of the skills that makes us homo sapiens, intelligent humans.  Quick messages and videos do not require our engaging in a thought process in the same way that reading and writing substantial compositions do. Short and simple pieces of writing or videos—headlines and clips—merely require a reaction. Ergo, you will be reading posts and hopefull will encourage your friends to read The Handel Letters. As Rose Horowitch argues in her article, there is much to be gained from slowly taking in—i.e., reading—a whole book, start to finish.