Greer Garson and Margaret O’Brien reading Eve Curie’s biography about her mother Marie, which the film Madame Curie (1943) is based on.
There is a story by Ray Bradbury, called “The Great Wide World Over There”, about an illiterate woman in the Appalachians. My initial encounter with said story may have also been the first time I ever considered the inherent privilege in being able to read, and also the role the ability to read plays in privilege. I have a memory of being three or four years old, driving through the hills of northern Texas, sitting in the passenger seat and watching the billboards flash past. Just being fixated on those billboards, looking at the letters—how did I know the shapes were letters and not just shapes? That transition in my learning I do not remember so clearly—and thinking that one day, the cloud of illiteracy obscuring the meaning of those shapes would soon part and that I, too, would know what they meant. And then not so long after, I remember those letters starting to seem less like shapes and more like words, and soon they were hardly visuals anymore, but words and sounds that appeared almost instantaneously in my head. Once this happened, I knew they would never go back to being vague letter-shapes on a billboard anymore.
I can’t imagine being an adult and surrounded by such letter-shapes and being unable to penetrate their opacity. To live in a mental darkness.
I know that this is no original, life-changing advice, but you should read to your children. Maybe they don’t need to learn to love reading, but they must learn to love what being able to read does for them.
