In Praise of a Very Determined Reader

When Canadian professional writer of detective fiction and avid reader Harold Engel's ability to read was taken away by a stroke, he could see letters, but "they looked like Cyrillic one moment and Korean the next." Engel couldn't accept this result, and very very slowly, with the help of a lot of therapy and trial and error, he taught himself to read again by tracing the letters in the air with his finger, or on the roof of his mouth with his tongue. Something about those movements reactivated his sense of the meaning of the letters and words. It is an awkward, slow process, but it has allowed him to read and write again; he has since published a novel and two memoirs. Oliver Sacks, the psychiatrist who has written about so many oddities of the human brain (most famously in his book "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat"), tells Engel's story in the current (6/28/10) issue of The New Yorker (see http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/28/100628fa_fact_sacks for a summary of the article). I am in awe of Engel's dogged determination, and see it as a testament to the crucial importance of reading -- far beyond its practical necessity -- to those for whom reading is a sort of life's blood. Engel says that he persisted because "Reading was hard-wired into me. I could no more stop reading than I could stop my heart....The idea of being cut off from Shakespeare and company left me weak." His experience -- along with the experiences of those who are blind or illiterate -- serves as a reminder to the rest of us not to take for granted the great privilege and pleasure of being able to read easily and at will.