Are We Losing Art of Reading?

There was a time when people read books without asking what they would get from them. They read because they wanted to know, to feel, to imagine. A book was not a shortcut to information it was a journey. Today, we live in a world where almost everything is designed to save time. Perhaps, in saving time, we are slowly losing the ability to spend it on something meaningful.
We still read, of course. We read news, posts, messages and endless pieces of information every day. But much of our reading has become impatient. We read a headline instead of a story, a summary instead of a book, a quote instead of a poem. We often want the meaning without experiencing the journey that creates the meaning.
A good book does not always give us an answer. Sometimes it gives us a question and leaves us alone with it. That is where real reading begins. We stop, think, return to a sentence and perhaps discover something about ourselves. The book might have been written by a person who died hundreds of years ago, yet a single line can suddenly describe a feeling we have never been able to express.
This is one of the quiet powers of literature. It reminds us that although the world changes, human beings do not change as much as we imagine. We still love, fear, dream, lose, remember and hope. The names change, the technology changes, but the human heart remains strangely familiar.
Our problem may not be that we have too little time. It may be that we have too little patience. We want quick entertainment, quick knowledge and quick answers. We have become uncomfortable with anything that asks us to wait. But the most valuable things in life rarely arrive quickly. Friendship takes time. Wisdom takes time. Understanding another person takes time. Perhaps understanding a book is no different.
Technology has made knowledge easier to reach. Artificial intelligence can explain a poem or summarise a novel in seconds. This is useful, but literature was never only about information. A summary can tell us what happened in a story. It cannot always tell us why the story stayed in our mind. Information tells us something but literature makes us feel something.
Maybe that is why reading still matters. A book demands our attention in a world that constantly tries to steal it. It asks us to sit quietly while everything around us tells us to move on. It gives us a rare chance to be alone with a thought.
Perhaps we are not losing the art of reading because books have become less important. We are losing it because silence has become unfamiliar and patience has become difficult. And yet, a quiet book still waits. It does not call us. It does not chase us. It simply waits for the moment when we are ready to slow down and listen.
Maybe that is what reading has always been not simply reading words, but learning how to stay with a thought long enough for it to change us.
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The writer is a teacher, lyricist and literary critic