Tuesday, June 15, 2010

C.S. Lewis Would Have Hated CNN


Beth always says she's in good company with C.S. Lewis whenever I give her a hard time about not staying up on current events. After reading this quote, I must admit he (and she) has a point. This one's for you, Shorty:

I can hardly regret having escaped the appalling waste of time and spirit which would have been involved in reading the war news or taking more than an artificial and formal part in conversations about the war. To read without military knowledge or good maps accounts of fighting which were distorted before they reached the Divisional general and further distorted before they left him and then "written up" out of all recognition by journalists, to strive to master what will be contradicted the next day, to fear and hope intensely on shaky evidence, is surely an ill use of the mind. Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

4 comments:

  1. The Dewdogger said a similar thing in his book "8 Weeks to Optimum Health" - the "news fast." I've been on it for at least 10 years now, and none the worse for wear...

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  2. it's the "fluttering" i fear most. and so should you! get out while you still can, shorty! i'm over here reading 50 pages a night, but can't bring myself to skim a newspaper. you tell me: between the two of us, who is going to be smarter in 30 years?

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  3. yes, the fluttering has been written about quite a bit in this internet age. of course, you wouldn't know that. but, i guess the fact that you already did proves your point. more and more i think my love of reading news and politics is like watching sports. entertaining, but ultimately pure recreation.

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