bikerbuddy

I’m going to take it as an axiom that the act of reading plays a vital role in the forming and conditioning of sensibility in the life of the committed reader. What interests me is to try to puzzle out the nature of that role. But before I do, I feel that I should pause over the word sensibility. It is, I realize, a humanist term that is slipping from usage; in our age of hard-edged critical terminology it suggests a fin-de-siècle precocity. What is sensibility, besides being the counterpart to sense? It is neither self nor ego; neither identity or personality. While these are designations for something one either has or is, sensibility is more of a construct. The old sense of the word is of a refinement or cultivation of presence; it refers to the part of the inner life that is not given but fashioned: a defining, if cloudy, complex of attitudes, predilections and honed responses. And for this very reason I want to have the term available. For while it can be many things, serious reading is above all an agency of self-making. When undertaken freely, the effort of engaging a book shows a desire to actualize and augment certain inner powers. The reader assumes the possibility of deepened self-understanding, and therefore recognizes the self as malleable. Reading is the intimate, perhaps secret, part of a larger project, one that finally has little to do with the more societally oriented conceptions of the individual.

Sven Birkets, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in the Electronic Age, Faber and Faber, (1994), page 87