Even in the worst of times – and who can doubt that the daily, brutal, unstoppable exploits of uncaught criminals have made this time one of widening and deepening fear and frustration – reading comes to the rescue by revealing other worlds of experience where cruelty and mindlessness and man’s inhumanity to man do not continually have the upper hand. One’s resolve is renewed not to give in to the hate, the contemptible antagonisms and the bitter discontent which threaten to suffocate all good feeling and civility and optimism and striving for improvement in this society.
- Adam Gopnik, one of my favourite essayists, writes in the New Yorker about an editorial in the great French daily newspaper Le Monde: “’What menaces us all at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in France, as in the United States, but also in Israel, as in Palestine, in India, as in Pakistan,” the editors wrote, “is the isolating of the Other in his identity – national, ethnic, or religious…To better know the Other in his own language and his own imagination is not to renounce oneself. It is, on the contrary, to accept the plurality of worlds, the diversity of visions, and, above all, a respect for differences.” A recondite literary allusion lies in the phrase “plurality of worlds”; it comes from the title of one of the great books of the French Enlightenment, Bernard Le Bovier Fontenelle’s seventeenth-century Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, which is one of the first published works of popular science. Fontenelle explored the idea that there might be many worlds out there in the universe, with many tongues and many points of view, to suggest, subversively, that it would be only natural to expect lots of points of view, tongues, and ideas down here on earth, too. It remains an – no, the – enlightened thought.”
