Another man stays at home until he dies,
stays with plates and glasses.
So then it is his children who go out
into the world, seeking the church that he forgot.— Rilke, The Book of Hours
It would be one thing if books were being replaced because we’d found a yet deeper way of encountering other minds and other times, or if we were going back to the days of long walks in the agora and debates on the nature of being. But one poster on X explained how he uses AI to “extract . . . the information” from a book that would otherwise take an hour to read—“and then I drink coffee for 58 minutes.” If you want a picture of our bookless future, imagine a row of influencers staring out their high-rise windows, their inner lives zeroed out to a total blank, sipping coffee forever.
“What are you trying / to be free of?” asks the poet Joseph Fasano in a poem addressed to a “Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper.” Is it “the living? The miraculous / task of it?” But “love is for the ones who love the work.” The kind of reading that retains its worth in the age of AI is the kind that has no measurable ROI, no scalable metrics, no immediate market value of any kind. It is like life in that the point of it is the story itself, and the only way to “get” it is to dwell in it and let it change you.
It has nothing to offer, in other words, besides the communion of soul with soul. But if we can’t value that, what is anything else worth?
We keep discovering, with great alarm, what our grandparents already knew and what our grandchildren will relearn: the appetite for elsewhere weakens the love of here. Fewer people sit with a book for no reason except to be with it; there are too many exciting harlots gyrating and beckoning to us. The skill of inwardness goes unused, then unusable. This is tragic. But what else is life if not the recurring drama of forgetting what steadies us and then rediscovering it when the world starts wobbling? “Young steers are always scenting purer water / Not here but anywhere,” Philip Larkin wrote. “Don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone,” sang glam-rock band Cinderella.
Modern digital machinery only sharpens the old temptation. A thousand short paths (sorry, hacks) promise the summit by lunchtime; a thousand “summaries” deliver the husk of what a book contains and none of what it does to you. We mistake extraction for experience, speed for understanding, the map for the walk. But the right page at the right hour does not hand us an “insight”; it alters our gait. It slows the breath. It brings a gesture or a silence into the room and leaves it there to work on us. You can relay the plot of a novel in ten lines; you cannot relay the ten seconds after a line lands in your chest.
Which leaves us with a choice that is perennial: will we live instrumentally, always as means toward a further goal, or will we also practice ends — acts that justify themselves in the doing? Reading belongs to the latter. It does not pay; it forms. It does not optimize; it orients. It is, in its modest way, a vow: to dwell with a voice long enough that it becomes a companion presence. If that sounds religious, it’s only because the old word fits. Books are our little chapels of attention. You enter, you sit, you keep company; you come out not saved, exactly, but steadied. The moment you spend there is not a detour from life. It is life, briefly freed from utility and delivered back to meaning.
So let the dashboards trend and the graphs slope. And yet, don’t despair. The pattern of neglect and revival is an old one. Reading may shrink to a sect for a while. So be it. The ancient monks kept literacy alive during plague, famine, and rampaging Vikings at the door; surely we can hold our ground against AI and Tiktok. Wisdom does not scale by broadcast; it travels by witness. One person reads and is changed, and another notices the change. That is how the line moves forward when the crowd surges elsewhere. The example is the argument. Be seen keeping company with a book. Make of your attention a small, steady fire. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it. When the quick pleasures go stale, some will be drawn by the gravity, by the presence, of those who have been quietly formed by texts, and they will wonder what it is you found there.
Another man stays home until he dies, stays with screens and gadgets, then his children go out seeking the church he forgot. Maybe the love of reading is precisely that church for our time. If so, our task is simple: keep it swept, keep it warm, and keep returning. None of this conquers a culture; it keeps a door from sticking. In time, someone — perhaps someone you love, perhaps someone you will never meet — will shoulder it open again and look around with the startled gratitude of pilgrims who realize the sanctuary was here all along.