Is reading a passport to success in life?

 

Anthony Burgess

I'm all in favour of reading decent literature and the best novelists, but I've never understood how reading is necessarily a "passport to a better future."

I've been an avid reader all my life and I have read extensively, the works of American, English, French and Russian authors. I do this, because I enjoy it and feel that I learn something from the experience. But if reading equates with success in life and a better future, then it certainly passed me by. If reading put money in your pockets, then I should be as a rich as Croesus, the King of Lydia.

The English novelist, George Orwell, seem to think that in England, the educated and qualified man, was always regarded with a certain amount of suspicion. In the British army, he might be regarded as what was called a barrack-room lawyer. But I also think that Orwell regards the English as generally being obscurantists, i.e. the enemies of intellectual enlightenment and the liberal diffusion of knowledge.

The writer Anthony Burgess, in his memoirs, described an encounter he had as a private soldier with a General during WWII. He was stationed at Newbattle Abbey, in Scotland. One day he was cleaning the toilets out when an elderly General with his entourage, stopped and spoke to him. He asked Burgess what he'd done in private life before he'd joined the army. Burgess told him that he'd just graduated with a Degree in English Literature from the University of Manchester. The General said to him, "Well private, it's nice to see you doing something useful for once in your life." Burgess says that there were private soldiers in the British Army who had PhD's. Most of them including Burgess, were put in the Education Corps, which entailed writing letters for illiterate British soldiers and reading letters to them from their wives. He recalled one wife telling her husband Bert, that since he'd been away, his stick of shaving soap which he'd left behind in the house had been more of a husband to her, than he'd ever been.

A senior nursing officer, who worked in an NHS hospital, once told me that the management were wary of recruiting educated people into certain posts, because they found them to be far too assertive and self-confident. When I asked her what she meant, she told me that they presented a challenge because they were always demanding their rights.

In a country like Britain, some of the top TV shows are the Great British Bake Off, Strictly Come Dancing and I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here. That tells you all you need to know about the homme moyen sensuel and cultural taste in Britain.