At a time when the en tire world seemed to be opening u p for me i n
the 1980s, I
was invited to endless ―drinks dos‖ across London. On two occasions, I had the
chance to meet a famous Kyrgyz author named Chinghiz Aitmatov, and although
the opportunity to engage with him at length never fully arose, I went on to read
his novels and learned to vigorously applaud his strangely poignant imagination on a
wide variety of textual levels. Indeed, it is something of a dystopian nightmare that
our ―youth of today‖ proactively shies away from Text in order to embrace the
merely optical. Hence, with hindsight, by way of scrutinizing his literary habits and
feeling compelled to sit in the seat of my imaginary time machine, I would seek to
quiz him about the reasons ―Why anybody should read anything?‖ All in all, I
suspect, a Central Asian bard of Aitmatov‘s stature would have suggested that
apart from liberating our intelligence century-by-century from outmoded
prejudices, and stretching personal brain capacity into a new-born range of
empathies, the art of reading unfolds those eminently rare, but essential, hours of
multicultural genius, thereby, so to speak, opening another exotic eye upon the
world