My Ear Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning

"The constant reading of the bible in hundreds of thousands of humble families kept a basic floor of literacy under literature as a whole, and under the English language. The variety of styles of writing so admirably represented, the relative complexity of many of the ideas involved and the range of ethical levels to be found in that great compendium of ancient Hebrew culture demanded, in its reading and in its exposition to the children, a certain mental activity, and provided for the poorer classes the same sort of cultural groundwork that the study of Greek and Latin provided for the sons of the rich. A mind accustomed to the Old and New Testaments could easily admit Shakespeare and the entire range of Victorian writing: poetry, novels, historic and scientific essays, up to the saturation point of that particular intelligence. Today the English-speaking peoples have no such common basic classical education. The bottom level is the visual and aural culture of the movies, not a literary level at all. Above that appear all sorts of gradations of illiteracy, from those who, though they may have learned to read in school, are now barely able to spell out the captions in the pictures, to those who can take in, with the help of the photographs, a few simple sentences out of the daily tabloids, right through to the several millions of actively literate people who can read right through The Saturday Evening Post or The Reader’s Digest and understand every word of it. This is the literal truth. Every statistical survey that has recently been made of literacy in this country has produced the most staggering results. We have to face the fact that the number of Americans capable of reading a page of anything not aimed at the mentality of a child of twelve is not only on the decrease but probably rapidly on the decrease." John Dos Passos An over simplification but some truth here. Albert Jay Nock had the same idea - being able to read is not the same as being literate. Brings to mind Lincoln whose formal schooling lasted about six months, perhaps a year. He succinctly summed up his educational background in 1858, when he filled out a brief biographical sketch for the upcoming Dictionary of Congress: “Education defective,” it read. Primarily self-taught he read the Bible & Shakespeare avidly. In an 1860 biography of candidate Lincoln, journalist William Dean Howells wrote that Mr. Lincoln was “a diligent student of Shakespeare, to know whom is a liberal education.” There's no denying this. Historian William E. Gienapp: "Lincoln’s gift for language was marvelous, even poetic, so much so that he is the only American president other than Thomas Jefferson whose writings can be considered literature.” As for the King James Bible: "The King James Bible came at the end of the Elizabethan age, between Shakespeare and Milton, when Englishmen were using words more passionately, richly, vigorously, wittily, and sublimely than ever before or since." Dwight Macdonald