Publish at September 13 2023 Updated September 13 2023
I remember my first book, the one you read with words as well as pictures. I don't remember the title, but I do remember the satisfaction and the flavor of the universe. In fact, the pleasure I had in reading it, and that pleasure was the key to everything.
Did you learn in pleasure or in displeasure? It would be interesting to know on what the taste for reading was built for people who are still reading years later.
A taste for reading is an intimate story that readers like to share, a solitary pleasure that very quickly becomes a paper feast. It's a long-standing relationship between oneself and books. A taste for reading is often a childhood joy that lights up your whole life. Sometimes it's the fruit of an upbringing or the familiar proximity of a library. But the passion for books is like any other passion: love at first sight and chance often get in the way...
Among these book-crazy readers are, of course, writers. Bulimic consumers of printed paper, they willingly evoke the birth of this passion for reading which is the source of their writing."
Source: Le Petit Mercure - Published 11/03/2010 - Genre: A taste for reading
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/le-gout-de-la-lecture-9782715229426.html
A long time ago, there was a time when books for the general public didn't exist, when dreams, well-being and escapism were to be found at parties, circus games or with troubadours at court.
There are many ways to experience universes and the extraordinary. There's the social way, where I go to concerts, shows and boxing matches; and there's the not-so-introspective, but rather extrapolated way, which involves books and television. I'm in my living room and I live the adventure from my living room. And then there are the players, who are also extrapolated from real life to immerse themselves together or alone in another universe, a metaverse. In the metaverse, we're extrapolated out of our bodies, but we're all living the adventure together.
The taste for reading speaks to us of passion, love at first sight, investigation, stories, legends, happiness... In fact, it speaks to us of adventure that takes us out of our usual contexts.
"The idea that it [adventure] is something foreign - and therefore, eccentric and extravagant - to ordinary life defines the modern conception of adventure. This idea is present in Simmel's otherwise insightful essay on the subject.
"It is indeed the form of adventure, in its greatest generality, to be outside the overall fabric of life",
we read on the very first page. That's why it's similar to dreams, which lie outside the significant link that characterizes "life in its totality". However, Simmel realizes that, while taking place outside the continuity of life, adventure is "quite different from something merely contingent, foreign" because it doesn't merely skim the surface, but "is linked in some way with the center of our existence".
Source: Giorgio Agamben, L'Aventure, 2016, Payot et Rivages
It is the nature of the human being that is in question. Is the human being as normative as a machine? Many examples around us show us that it isn't, including escapism through books, but also through other media and always, through immersion in a different elsewhere.
"The beginning of this excerpt from G. Agamben's book suggests that adventure is only the result of events external to us, disrupting for a moment "the overall fabric of life", without actually affecting it. In this way, we might read The Odyssey or Heart of Darkness as two tales of adventure, describing a series of unforeseen, astonishing and exotic events, but "foreign" to those who experience them, exceptional and on the margins of their lives.
For Agamben, G. Simmel's idea of adventure reduces it to "that which only scratches the surface". Contrary to its etymology, which gives it its full meaning and value for Jankélévitch, this adventure has no future, opens up to nothing new, and therefore to nothing that would touch our existence at its "center", its identity. It's on the margins, just as having an adventure implies a passing fancy or a dream. But, as Simmel agrees and as our subject indicates, adventure can also touch our existence at its core, concern our intimacy, participate in our ways of living and thinking".
Source : L'aventure, Simon Perrier, in L'Enseignement philosophique 2018/3 (68e Année), pages 37 to 48
https://www.cairn.info/revue-l-enseignement-philosophique-2018-3-page-37.htm
If we are hunter-gatherers in origin, between the surprise of the gathering and the exaltation of the hunter having found his prey, the story is as old as the world, but it is also that of subsequent generations who, in their tranquil or less tranquil worlds, seek to reconnect with the visceral sensations of their ancestors.
"Robinson's theme - that of a man thrown into the unknown, alone and helpless, who nonetheless begins all human discoveries and conquests anew - has since inspired a host of other novels: L'île mystérieuse and other Jules Verne novels, stories of shipwrecks on Earth and even on other planets, and shipwrecks and expeditions in time, from the books by Wells to those by Jean-Claude Froelich and the Americans in L'invention du professeur Costigan, reconstructing their everyday world in a prehistoric desert.
Unfortunately, we don't always seem to have the imagination or audacity to escape from recipes and finally create something new. Perhaps this is the source of a certain confusion in the very notion of adventure, a confusion that adults often seem to share with children.
We asked over 200 young readers: What is an adventure novel? and what do you like about these adventures? For every few spontaneous, lively answers, how many repeated formulas, conventions, excitement mistaken for vitality, enthusiasm going round in circles? And therein lies the danger of these "children's detectives", these derisory "mysteries" that close the game in on itself and, instead of opening up perspectives for the creative imagination, only dispose the sensibility to the mania of gratuitous suspense.
Among the most positive definitions:
- Adventure novels give me a better understanding of man, how he proves his courage and intelligence. Philippe, aged 12.
- A series of unpredictable actions that mark a man's history. Bertrand, age 12.
- They encourage us to live or imagine what we would do if we found ourselves in the hero's shoes. Florence, aged 10.
- A book that recounts the deeds and actions of a hero who threw himself into life unexpectedly. A 15-year-old boy.
- A novel whose action, even psychological, takes place in different places, where the author, in the midst of all the twists and turns, takes me on a journey. A 15-year-old girl.
- People fall into an unknown country: their means of subsistence and defense. A 13-year-old boy.
- Something unexpected, unreal. At first you're afraid, then you get used to it. Then you have to leave. There has to be danger, an adventure where the kids are alone. A 12-year-old girl.
- A book in which people experience moments more outside their ordinary lives. They have misfortunes or joys that particularly change their lives. A 15-year-old girl.
- A novel that just tells the story of a normal life, but that everyone sees in their own way, is not an adventure novel. A 14-year-old girl".
Source: WHAT IS AN ADVENTURE NOVEL? A survey of young readers
https://cnlj.bnf.fr/sites/default/files/revues_document_joint/PUBLICATION_2092.pdf
If the sensations remain the same, the media have changed. Books used to be for people who lived adventure in their heads, for intellectuals who preferred the adventure of the head to the adventure of the body. That's what the War of the Buttons could teach us, but today's dunce escapism is also to be found in video games.
Where the book had a physical boundary, the book is open, the book is closed; it is read or abandoned, today the book has become alive, it moves ceaselessly, the story is one, is multiple, depending on the number of players. You're absorbed in it, and it's hard to get out. It's new, and we're going to have to adapt. This is the metaverse:
"Mirror, oh my beautiful mirror, tell me who's the most beautiful, the most attractive, the most hip, the most..." goes the most narcissistic modern anti-hero. Julien, the new character in Nathan Devers' novel Les Liens artificiels (Albin Michel), is the kind of character nobody wants to be: a failed anonymous who tries to remake himself, rather cowardly but not without success, in the Metaverse. After Ciel et Terre (Flammarion, 2020 - Prix Edmée de la Rochefoucauld) and Espace fumeurs (Grasset, 2021), young writer Nathan Devers depicts the unbridled quest for pleasure of an unremarkable young man in the virtual paradise of Metaverse."
Source: "Les Liens artificiels" by Nathan Devers, a dream life in the Metaverse.
https://www.letemps.ch/culture/livres/liens-artificiels-nathan-devers-une-vie-revee-metavers
https://www.decitre.fr/livres/les-liens-artificiels-9782226475053.html
Metavers and its prequels, video games, are the equivalent of reading books in high doses. It's the difference between tobacco and drugs, or occasional wine and full-blown alcoholism. And especially if you have wounds to heal, it's a drug that can gangrene the whole individual. It's all a question of dosage.
A long time ago, when I was young, some parents forbade their children to watch TV. They would be, or they are, horrified by our world. Should we prohibit or immunize? It's a strategic question. In any case, deciding to protect our children is a double-edged sword, as it makes them more vulnerable to temptation.
The same applies to the school. For over a century, the school hasn't changed much. It's like living in a harbor and refusing to board passing ships. Today, we still have the choice to follow or not. Tomorrow, perhaps those same boats will choose who to let on board or not; it's up to us to let them or not.
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