Aisle or Isle

In the last few years, I have noticed that a shocking amount of people on social media do not know how to spell the word aisle. They write isle. Besides the usual problems with their, there, and they’re, I notice the misspelling of the word aisle the most. I feel sure that there was a time when most people knew how to spell this.

I’m thinking about this partly because I recently read Rose Horowitz’s depressing article in the Atlantic, The End of Reading is Here. This is the line that gave me goosebumps: The literate era will prove to be a brief interlude between the oral and digital ages.

As a writer, this article felt like especially bad news. But also as a person in the world. My favorite people are well read.

Years ago, I was perusing the Facebook of a particular nemesis in my life, someone I was forced to deal with periodically, and I saw a gushy post she had made about her sister-in-law. She wrote about how the woman had seen her children off to school and was such a good mom! And then, get this, she started reading a novel! A novel!

I remember being amazed and horrified by this post. The absolute awe my nemesis revealed for the reading of a book. The liberal use of exclamation points. One book. And yes, I judged the shit out of her. Nothing says you haven’t read a book in decades like making a post fawning over someone else for reading a book. My mind is still blown.

The article wasn’t all bad news. Book stores are still opening and book sales are still sometimes robust. However, this is only because of a small percentage of readers.

“Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. ‘It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.’”

As I read Horowitz’s article, I realized that I have inadvertently created my own bubble where besides seeing strangers’ spelling mistakes on social media, I can walk through my days believing that Horowitz is wrong. My favorite people write and read constantly. I make my living coaching other writers, having the unique privilege of reading hundreds of pages about their lives and their experiences and their thoughts. Many of my conversations in any given week revolve around books and books in progress. It is a kind of heaven and I don’t want it to change.

But Horowitz’s article took me out of my own life and made me think. Mostly, I thought about young people. I just started teaching a private class for two eighteen-year-olds and the article put me in their shoes. They have grown up with YouTube and iPhones and TikTok. One of the students in this private class is my son, Atlas. He and I have had many conversations about screens and about books. He acknowledges the hardships I’ve identified as unique to his generation- ten years of Trump, the pandemic, school shooting drills all through school- but thinks that the single most destructive element to infiltrate his generation is online life.

Horowitz writes, “Could the generations growing up with their brains hooked to endless video feeds be developing some kind of novel, as-yet-undetectable cognitive brilliance? Perhaps. But for now, the decline of reading seems to be ushering in a less rational, analytical, and sophisticated mode of thinking. It’s difficult to see any advantages in that.”

This one passage gave me a hint of hope and so I latched onto it. Last week, I gave my two young students a prompt based on covid. I wanted to see what they might make from the strange time when they experienced the pandemic lockdown as twelve-year-olds.

“I may just selfishly give you guys prompts every week based on the things I most want to get your perspective on,” I said to them. We laughed.

We turned our cameras off for fifteen minutes and when they came back, they read their work.

They both blew me away. Each piece was completely unique, all their own, but both pieces truly moved me. They were like nothing I’ve been hearing in my classes with adults. They wrote with emotion and beautiful phrasing and a definite vision of what that global event meant to them as developing human beings. There was a thrilling creative recklessness or risk-taking in both pieces but without losing the reader. I was floored. Maybe they are different from their peers. They both grew up pursuing creative endeavors and both want to find creative careers. Or maybe every young person just needs the chance to be asked to write creatively about their own lives. I don’t know. But while I sit with Horowitz’s article lodged in my consciousness, I’m going to hold the memory of those two pieces close to my heart, just to keep the walls of my bubble up a little longer, to give myself some hope in the nearly hopeless world that we currently live in.

Thank you for reading.

You can read Rose Horowitz’s article here.