Bokelskere.no

But we are interested chiefly in the mythological function of reading in itself; for here we are dealing with a specific phenomenon of the modern world, unknown in earlier civilisations. Reading replaces not only the oral folk traditions, such as still survive in rural communities of Europe, but also the recital of the myths in the archaic societies. Now, reading, perhaps even more than visual entertainment, gives one a break in duration, and at the same time an "escape from time". Whether we are "killing time" with a detective story, or entering into another temporal universe as we do in reading any kind of novel, we are taken out of our own duration to move in other rythms, to live in a different history. In this sense reading offers us an "easy way", it provides a modifications of experience at little cost: for the modern man it is the supreme "distraction", yielding him the illusion of a mastery of Time which, we may well suspect, gratifies a secret desire to withdraw from the implacable becoming that leads towards death.