Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 April 1919 — Declares Reading Is Like a Narcotic—Clouds Mind [ARTICLE]

Declares Reading Is Like a Narcot ic—Clouds Mind

The habit of reading for amusement becomes with thousands of people exactly the same kind of habit as wine drinking or opium smoking; it Is like a narcotic, something that helps to pass the time, something that keeps up a perpetual condition of dreaming, something that eventually results in destroying all capacity for thought, giving exercise only to the surface parts of the mind and leaving the deeper springs of feeling and the higher faculties of perception unemployed. The result of all this reading means nothing but a cloudiness In the mind. That is the direct result. The indirect result is that that mind has been kept from developing Itself. All development necessarily means some pain, and such reading as I speak of has been employed unconsciously as a means to avoid that pain, and the consequence is atrophy.—Lafcado Hearn.