JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

No one should read more than they write, and no one should write more than they think. Most people put far too much importance and gravity on other people’s ability and appropriateness to inform, guide and entertain them, and in doing so, disregard and malign their own ability to do those things for themselves.

Now, to those of you who know me, you will probably find that statement to be a bit shocking, given my general reputation as a voracious reader and collector of books. So let me share with you why I was such a reader and collector, and why now I own less than five percent of the books that I did a year ago.

The vast majority of my reading, from when I first was able to do so, until now, has been for simple escapism, and I would wager that almost all voluntary reading is done for that reason alone. Finding our circumstances not ot our liking; lacking in comfort, emotion, or adventure, we reflexively retreat, and what easier or more portable a retreat is there for the literate than a book? How much easier it is to ignore our circumstance and the hard work of figuring out how we got there, where we would rather be, and how to get from one to the other. How much easier to escape into some other, fictional world than to remedy what we find wrong with our own.

However, when I say “fictional world”, I do not mean to restrict my criticism solely to those who consume works of fiction. Included also is the person who, unhappy with the life they have now, and wishing that they had made different choices earlier in life, in college perhaps, reads and collects all that s/he can on some particular topic, such as architecture or history; whatever field they now realize that they would rather be working in. I would go so far as to posit that the majority of non-fiction book sales are the result of these private games of dress-up that we play when we are tired of our work or house or spouse or whatever.

In a very short period of time, I have gone from being a seriously overfed idea consumer to a much thinner idea generator, at least in my own life - whether or not any of those ideas survive out in the world remains to be seen, and is the impetus for this blog…