I’ve had the privilege recently of being a Harvard University professor, and there I learned one of the greatest of Harvard jokes. A group of rabbis are on the road to Golgotha and Jesus is coming by under the cross. The young rabbi bursts into tears and says, “Oh, God, the pity of it!” The old rabbi says, “What is the pity of it?” The young rabbi says, “Master, Master, what a teacher he was.” “Didn’t publish!” That cold tenure-joke at Harvard contains a deep truth. Indeed, Jesus and Socrates did not publish. Moreover, even during the golden age of what is called mass literacy – a brief age – the degree of actual capacity and usage remained exceedingly difficult to access. We now have the documents – they’ve only been studied fairly recently – of the examinations undergone by the conscripts in 1914 in France at the height of that Republique. In fact, over seventy percent of the conscripts from rural areas, and from less privileged urban areas also, could read only a few words, if at all. The French army instituted a rush program of elementary literacy. That’s 1914. Or the decisions throughout North America today, be it in ads or in the press, to never use dependent clauses because, to most human beings, they are indecipherable. Thoroughly literate societies remain few. There is no serious bookstore as distinct from a kiosk between Rome and Bari, not one.

I loved the story from 1938, precisely documented, of one of the last exams for the baccalaureate in the University of Salamanca. The government knew the candidate was the young Duke of Alba. The government officials say to the examiners, “No nonsense, no nonsense! It is his grace, the Duke of Alba.” “Yes, Yes.” The Duke comes in and the trembling examiners ask, “Your Grace, you have read Don Quixote? Long silence. “Why should I?” he answered. If you are the Duke of Alba you don’t need to read Don Quixote, or anything else. The point I am trying to make is that what was often confidently asserted as being literacy was nothing of the kind. Literacy was complex, often fragmentary, often local.

Why should I read? Classical literacy, literi humanoraes – what a magnificently proud and arrogant word – entails a number of fundamental assumptions and expectations that we rarely pause to examine. There is a sacredness of the foundational text, of the Ur-text, itself usually revealed or dictated, as on Mount Sinai, or on the Isle of Patmos to John.