I am a writer in a long line of writers, among my people and all people who have been writing these last few thousand years. And I write, just as I read, because I believe that in the realm of literaturewe are, each of us, free. Free to imagine, to invent, to change our minds, to travel through time, across space, to feel and experience the full breadth of ourselves, and to do what I don’t believe can be done in any other realm, medium, or dimension: to step into the mind of another. Feel what it is to live inside another and, in the process, enlarge ourselves beyond the borders of selfhood, into the vaster fields of mutual understanding and empathy. As such, literature is fundamentally democratic but for one major caveat: To access its freedoms, we must be taught to read, value and engage with literature.

At the crossroads where we now stand, among the many other things at stake, is the future of reading, writing and literature, and all of the expansive freedom it has afforded us.

In my lifetime, I have watched the demolition of the capacity to read and engage with books. Not just of our children, who have been the unwitting guinea pigs of growing up inside of a cellphone, but among all of us human beings. We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachment to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other. The blatantly, proudly senseless speech of our current leaders is not the cause, it is merely the most extravagant example of what happens when an entire culture — increasingly, the monoculture of the world — gives up on, and ceases to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language — to translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share. Writing and reading are not effortless. But, without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.

-Nicole Krauss in The WaPost