The end of writing and reading will be the end of freedom

Washington Post22-05-2025

Nicole Krauss is a novelist and a 2025 Guggenheim fellow.
For the past year I've lived away from my home in America, in Rome, among the achievements and the ruins of 3,000 years. It's made me deeply aware of the long arc of history, which saw the rise and fall of almost everything: democracies and dictators, gods and humans, war and peace, that which was feared, and that which was loved and cherished. And though the countless crossroads people arrived at in history, arguing about which way to go, may have since faded into the indelible road chosen, I'm also acutely aware that we now stand at another. That the direction we choose will determine not only our children's future, but the future of what it will mean to be human — and the conditions under which human life will unfold.
Whether the still-relatively young values of liberalism will survive, whether reading and writing will continue to be the underpinnings of culture, whether the constructs and algorithms of AI will replace the freedoms of selfhood, whether we will dominate and destroy nature, or salvage and protect it: We now stand before these questions. Stand and, I hope, pause. For in the stillness of that pause, the lessons of history sometimes speak to us.
Lately, I've found such a lesson in the history of my own people. In the 5th century B.C., when the Jews in exile in Babylon were allowed to return to Jerusalem, they were called upon to rebuild themselves, their city and their lives in their homeland. In exile, without a land or a Temple, the Jews wrote and transcribed the Torah. The opportunity to return to reconstruct their home and rebuild the Temple raised a vital question: What kind of people are we going to be?
The synoptic Books of Ezra and Nehemiah are two accounts of that return and its essential question. Ezra, a priest, laments the moral and spiritual decline of the newly reestablished community, and calls for religious reforms and priestly leadership. But it is in Nehemiah that we read of something truly extraordinary: the first record of the Torah being read in public. Ezra brought the scroll out and read from it 'facing the square before the Water Gate, from the first light until midday, to the men and the women and those who could understand; the ears of all the people were given to the scroll of the Torah. … They read from [it], translating it and giving the sense; so they understood the reading.'
It is impossible to exaggerate how momentous this moment was. At perhaps the greatest juncture the Jews have ever faced, the Temple was replaced by Torah. Sacrifice was replaced by reading, teaching and study. And Judaism was made independent of place and became portable, ensuring its survival to this day.
Dayenu, as we say. But there is even more to those astounding lines in Nehemiah than the choice of Torah over Temple. What we find is a radical step toward democratization: toward the democratic ideals that generations of later Jews would not only embrace but die without, and also die to create — and whose present endangerment many are now protesting in the streets and squares of their cities and countries. In those few lines of Nehemiah, we find a rejection of a hierarchical system based on hereditary power in the hands of the few, toward the town square, where all men and women are offered the chance to participate, to listen, learn and understand the teachings for themselves. It might be argued that from that day on, all that is required to live as a Jew are words. No more, and no less.
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 literature we 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.
This month, hundreds of thousands of students are graduating across the United States, from colleges and universities where it is the lifework of countless professors to ensure they have access to the freedom that comes with becoming a reader, being able to write for oneself, and partake in a culture of literature and ideas. Which, to me, is deeply heartening.
And I do believe that history is long, and that where there is destruction, there is also the potential for tikkun, for repair. For thousands of years, we have been finding words for ourselves, we have been writing our own story, and in the process have done something far more radical than expressed ourselves: We have invented ourselves. We have asked the essential question: Who are we, and what kind of people do we want to be? And it is, I believe, only as readers and writers, only as people educated in the bonding of language and meaning, that we have any hope of rising to the occasion of an answer.