We used to read comic books. They taught us how to read.

We’d look at the pictures and the words ballooning out of the mouths, and our eyes would go to the next picture, and more words. Our minds would fill in the missing spaces, and assume the motion from one picture to the next, so we got the flow of the story provided by ourselves. We controlled the pace, to be sure we got it all.

We didn’t think anything of it. It was just naturally the way things are, one to the next. Like stop-action, where the mind fills in. Like a whole movie flattened out on a page and we become the projector, but better, because we can go back whenever we want and don’t have to change the reels.

We were lucky. Because when we learned to read, we could read and did. Our minds were trained to see cause and effect, to speculate what comes next, then turn the page to see if we were right.

Today’s kids now, they don’t have that. The electronic pace dictates the speed of thought.

People say still waters run deep. How deep can you be if your mind is never still, running like a motor or a nose, a rat on a wheel, a shallow downhill stream?

They sing that Video Killed the Radio Star. Of course it did. It took the burden from the mind to create the pictures.

As with everything, that has two sides, yin/yang, yes/no, off/on, at least two possibilities. Sometimes more. Maybe always more.

Listening to the radio was like reading a book. The mind creates the images. Then when video provides the images, the mind doesn’t have to do the work, can’t do it because it’s already pre-digested. We sometimes say, “Oh, so that’s what it looks like.”

But if we read and/or listen, and then see, we sometimes say, “No, that’s not right, that’s not the way it should look.”

We aren’t aware that someone’s done our thinking for us and given us a finished product under their control.

That’s why, if we never read Tolkien, and never saw the Peter Jackson films, if we only saw the shallow cartoon of The Hobbit, we would dismiss and lose a whole dimension of our lives.

If we don’t read, even if we can, we diminish ourselves, and get used to living less.

We used to start out innocent. We were in the Garden and had to eat the apple to get out. We learned anatomy by looking at National Geographics. We didn’t have an Internet to jump-start immobility.

We didn’t allow ourselves to become addicted to fast food.

We didn’t allow ourselves to throw away. Like Shakespeare. When we think it’s only the story, we miss the language and the thought.

We miss the restlessness of mind which, before cameras were invented, still exercised a cinematic eye which came in for close-ups and panned out to see the landscape and the shape of things. I didn’t look for it, but I notice it in Hawthorne and Flaubert, and… as far back as Gilgamesh where the writer/reader eye follows him through the tunnel of darkness to the final anguished cry.

We’ve lost and don’t know what we’ve lost.

We’ve let someone else do our thinking for us.

We have more raw materials available but don’t know how to fit them together.

We used to say Heaven help us, and now we just say Help!

Next time I think about all this, I’ll try to be more positive, and look on the bright side.