Can non-readers stay in the middle class?

I took a cross-continent flight recently and sat next to a nice, clean-cut young man of about 19. On such a long trip, one gets to know things about a seat-mate even without talking. This fellow had distinguished himself by sitting in his seat for more than five hours and not reading a single word.

Let me correct that. He must have read the labels on the stack of music CDs he had brought along. Otherwise, how would he have known which ones to slip into his portable player? At one point, he unplugged his earphones from the CD player and plugged them into a DVD device. On that screen, he watched an action movie. (My peripheral vision caught the exploding fireballs.)

A recent study from the National Endowment for the Arts found that fewer and fewer Americans are reading literature. By literature, the NEA meant novels, short stories, plays or poetry. To be included as a consumer of such writing, you had to have read a work in your leisure time (not in class) over the previous year.

After observing my neighbor for five-plus hours, I thought, the heck with novels, poetry and plays. How about reading the cereal box? How about reading anything? This well-mannered son of the American middle class had sat for almost six hours without picking up as much as a comic book. He clearly enjoyed rock music. He might have brought along a fan magazine that was 80 percent pictures. Had the captions scared him away? I caught him briefly scribbling a message in a notebook, so he probably wasn’t learning impaired.

I can assure you that this busybody did not spend that long stretch of time reading Shakespeare sonnets. She watched and enjoyed the feature-length cartoon “Shrek 2.” She ate lunch. She looked at the maps in the United Airlines in-flight magazine. But she would have gone out of her mind had there not been some quality reading matter at her disposal. In her case, there were newspapers, a current-affairs magazine and a book on California.

Let us note that by the standards of the NEA study, I had read no literature during the flight. Nonfiction did not count, which is one of the survey’s flaws. There are finely written journals on foreign affairs, and there are trashy novels. “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” is a classic work of history. It would not have fallen under the NEA’s definition of literature, nor would have Samuel Johnson’s essays. Presumably Edith Wharton’s novels would have been considered literature, but not her writings on home decoration.

Be that as it may, the bar for admission into the literary elite was not high. All you had to do was read one measly poem in the course of the year, and you were in. The NEA findings were interesting, nonetheless.

According to the study, less than half of the U.S. adult population read anything literary during 2002. And of people in my plane-mate’s age group – the 18- to 24-year-olds – only 43 percent had read literature on their own, way down from 60 percent in 1982.

Yes, there are lots of things competing for our leisure time. I probably don’t read as much literature as the NEA would like me to. I do watch TV and listen to jazz. I subscribe to Netflix, which means I’m never without a reasonably good movie DVD.

But none of these competitors was available during the flight. We were cooped up on an airplane for hours on end. A person who didn’t read anything under those circumstances simply did not read.

This leads to some interesting thoughts. Ours is an information economy. We who consume massive amounts of information know that there’s no substitute for the written word. (It would take an hour to read the front page of The Wall Street Journal out loud.)

If that’s the case, can all these young non-readers retain their membership in the middle class? Or will audio and visual media somehow provide the knowledge they need? I don’t know how that could happen, and upon landing, I said goodbye to my seat-mate with an air of concern.

Froma Harrop is a Providence Journal columnist. Contact her by writing to fharrop@projo.com.