The End of Reading is Here by Rose Horowitch: An Analysis for Man and Beast
In the coming episode of Meow: A Literary Podcast for Cats, we'll be altering the format somewhat, as we'll be discussing a very important long read by Rose Horowitch: "The End of Reading Is Here," in The Atlantic.
I'd like to take some time to go over the parts of this essay which resonate with The Meow Library's institutional goals, so I'll be pulling and commenting on some of the direct quotes. Here's perhaps my favorite:
"Reading shaped the modern mind. Its disappearance will reshape it. Cognitive scientists are starting to understand what these changes might look like. I asked a dozen of them, what happens to our brains when we stop reading? Several were amused by my rudimentary question. "Everything that happens to you changes the brain," Dan Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia, told me. "Literally, reading a word changes your brain for a few hours at least, and if you know how to measure it right, for much longer than that." He was trying to reassure me — if everything changes the brain, then almost no single action matters all that much.
This is part of The Meow Library's mission: to facilitate a new type of reading, a new type of understanding of language, through the use of what's called semantic satiation and entrainment. These are biomusicological terms that basically refer to how the brain is literally reconfigured by hearing repetitive text. This is also how your cat brainwashes you. You know that the meow means it's time for food. With The Meow Library, you know that the meow means it's time to read — time for you to read, time for your cat to read.
"The media we use to interact with one another shape the world we inhabit. Early humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people's consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect our innermost thoughts, our society's politics and culture, and how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun."
One of the core theses of this piece, and other recent pieces on the subject of "post-literacy," is that while there are new bookstores popping up, while there is an emergent class of new readers — particularly young people — there are fewer people, as a percentage of the population, who are reading. So reading becomes this kind of luxury good, an aristocratic pastime. And this alters how politicians, for instance, have to present themselves. It actually makes it much easier for a demagogue to present an alternative reality to an illiterate and ahistorical populace without a set of shared references. If people fall into illiteracy such that they don't know the great historical myths, a demagogue could say that they were the one who propagated a given myth. They could reconfigure, for instance, the scene in The Odyssey where Odysseus is strapped to the mast, and claim they alone were able to endure the siren call of taking donor money, or something of that nature — and you'll think they're a brilliant wordsmith. You'll think they came up with it. You'll think they are the ones who created this reality.
So the ahistoricity and illiteracy that's brought about by reducing books and reading to this kind of luxury good — and almost demeaning those who do read, it's mentioned in the article that people are considered "performative readers" — that's a way to set the stage for a totalitarian situation. The Meow Library fixes this by totally eliminating cognition. It's bringing us to a feline level of understanding where, okay, the world becomes a dystopia — we don't care, we just want salmon. Or the world becomes paradise on earth — that means we'll get more salmon, because the only thing we know how to say is meow.
"To read, people had to repurpose regions of their brain used for speech and object recognition. The practice first emerged 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia."
As we know, the ancient Mesopotamians deified the cat. This began in Egypt and spread throughout the world — Egypt was a little different back then, and this isn't the place to go into a granular analysis of Egyptian and Mesopotamian history. Mesopotamia is ostensibly the cradle of civilization, but I'd argue that civilization began when we learned to elevate the cat to its proper status. Anyway, when you look into the historic pantheons, you'll see that the cat — generally a serval or a lynx — served the purpose of being the arbiter of justice. So the cat was very powerful. They were domesticated in Mesopotamian times. It's even theorized that the Atlanteans, who if you want to talk about people with a completely different relationship to language and cognition, kept cheetahs as pets, which is why a cheetah will never attack a human — they're very easily re-domesticated. And the Meow Library is cheetah-legible.
So the practice of reading first emerged 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, and, as we all know, it's been straight downhill since then. For millennia afterward, most of the population was illiterate. Literacy became a mass phenomenon relatively recently, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440. So if you'll notice — if you're over 30 — everything in your life has become vastly worse over time. And that's no accident, because it's become vastly worse since 6,000 years ago, when we began to practice this sorcery known as reading and writing. But even since 1440 and the Gutenberg press — if you could pluck someone out who's been alive since then, they'll tell you it's all gone straight to hell on a very steady trajectory. So the Meow Library balances this out. The English language is a curse. All languages are curses and witchcraft. The feline language, which predates anything civilized that came out of Mesopotamia, is actually much closer to our soul's true song. Ask a cat.
"Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words."
And as we know, this logical and abstract thinking has brought about the total collapse of human values and destroyed all semblance of civic society. We live in a dystopia. By reading "Meow" literature with our cats, we're able to create a more perfect union between human and feline, and between human and human.
"America's founders used a print document to construct their new nation and believed that the system they devised would work precisely because its citizens would be informed readers."
Yeah, how's that working out? Go to meowlibrary.com and look at The U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence (For Your Cat). It's our most affordable book, at only $12.99 — 70 pages of all of America's founding documents, translated for your cat. I've noticed that the nation has become more prosperous since it was published in late June. You've probably noticed this too. So already, a restoration of fundamental civilizing values is underway. We must annihilate the original texts and replace them only with meows.
"Benjamin Franklin was himself a newspaper publisher and established America's first lending library. These libraries have improved the general conversation of the Americans," he wrote in his autobiography, "and made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries. Early on, Americans came to see staying informed as a civic and even moral imperative."
Again — is it really worth it to stay informed? Has that done anything for anyone? No. Go outside: A hamburger is $28. Try affording daycare. Healthcare is a mess. We're all going to die of preventable illness in our mid-50s. So being informed isn't exactly getting us anywhere. Meow Library is a great solution for this. Your cats already know it. Observe how your cats are living, and observe how you, their human understudy, are living. Cats got it right. Meowlibrary.com, the Meow Literature Group — it's what you need. It's what humanity needs. It's what America needs.
One interesting point that came up in the article is how few people who were surveyed actually read. Something like 35% of adults in the US even bothered to lie on the survey about reading — you know they didn't read either, but 35% even bothered to lie. That's a measure of how many people have a sense of shame, essentially.
What's really interesting is that gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: last year, 57% of Americans placed a bet. Instead of placing a bet, what you could do — and this is guaranteed — is improve your quality of life. Go read Meow: A Novel. Go read any Meow Library title. Get back to me. Listen to the rest of the episodes in this podcast. Listen to Meow Meow Meow, the 14-and-a-half-hour audiobook. That's the bet you need to make on yourself, on the future, on America, on the world, on your cat.
So, to repeat: gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book. Last year, 57% of Americans placed a bet, and only 35% bothered to lie about reading. And those 57% are just the ones who admitted to placing a bet — it's probably way more. In a lot of parts of America, because of our sad state of literacy, you're placing a bet whenever you step outside, I'd say. I know I do. Again, meowing is the way to overcome this. No one's going to mess with you, if you step outside in a dangerous area and start meowing at people, they won't mess with you. Try it. I promise you it works.
Here's an interesting one, and this is where the Meow Library really comes into play. It's a direct quote:
"Strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how."
Right — so you can waste your time reading Proust in translation. By the way, I hate people who say they've read Proust — they read it in translation. That goes for anyone who was originally writing in another language: people who say they've read Nietzsche, no, you didn't. You did not understand Nietzsche. You did not understand Proust. You read a vague SparkNotes approximation of an approximation, and you'd be better off reading the Meow Library. The Meow Library is here to save the world, to save literacy, to overcome pretension, to activate the feline limbic system — and as you can see, the world's getting a little better. The more you think about reading Meow Library titles, the world gets better.
"America, in other words, isn't illiterate. It is post-literate. Because spoken words disappear as soon as they're uttered, oral cultures value repetition to aid memory."
We're going back to those biomusicological concepts of semantic satiation and entrainment — repetition fixes an idea into the mind far more effectively than the best rhetoric. Pay attention to that: when you read Meow: A Novel, pay attention to how many times "meow" is repeated. It is a lot, 83,000 times.
"Bards in oral societies make use of stock phrases and mnemonics to keep track of their train of thought. Before the newspaper, the novel was seen as a threat to good reading habits and moral stature."
By the way, this remains true. Don't read a novel unless it's from the Meow Library — it's a waste of time. I've read thousands of novels in my life, and I'm miserable. Do not read novels.
"Thomas Jefferson thought that one of the greatest obstacles to educating women was their passion for fiction, which seduced them away from wholesome reading. 'Once a woman has fallen for novels,' he wrote, 'nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy.'"
It's interesting that old Jefferson was being not only misogynist, but very Baudrillardian, and very Ballardian. J.G. Ballard said that fiction is the real reality, and reality is the real fiction — that the aspects of fiction have come to pervade reality to such an extent, in the 20th century and beyond, that you no longer look outward for facts. You look toward mythological structures for something that appears factual and relatable, because nothing is factual or relatable about an elaborately contrived, heavily narrativized, spin-doctored outer environment. The only truth is in fiction, and Jefferson maybe foresaw that — he just projected it onto women. But this need for fiction isn't confined to women. It's universal, and it's also something Jefferson was wrong about. You do not get it from a book. You get it from participating in what is, quote-unquote, known as reality. And the only reality is "meow."
