Too much has already been written about the essential usefulness of reading, but too little about its uselessness, and even then it will never be enough. Uselessness has become a disused value, but it is more essential than the thick and polluted air of cities, more than the dispossession of the irremediable and crude reality, and still more than the obstinate confusion of presences and absences of the brief, effective and immediate communication. That of uselessness is a virtue whose meaning cannot be treasured without mentioning that it is useless for this world to be reading, that it annoys or disturbs or bothers the individual reader who is not subjected to permanent activity or docile to the logic of profit, consumption and purpose. It is that reading is useless, then, and that is its only or greatest virtue. It is useless, if by serving we understand servitude and loss of unique...read more
