Occasionally, we would continue after lunch. Over several months, we completed all three volumes of Tolkien s Lord of the Rings . Brian Jacques Redwall series lent itself to multiple regional British accents. The moles spoke like Sussex farm laborers, the badgers were upper-crust aristocrats, the squirrels for some reason were Scottish, the otters Irish, and the shrews Liverpudlian. Not a minute sooner.
Literacy has many uses.
Conventional employment requires it. The human imagination feeds on it. The historian sifts and winnows the archives of the ages to record this generation s opinion of the past for future reference. The poet, the playwright, and the novelist craft things of beauty out of sounds reduced to markings on a page and then set free again when pronounced aloud or in the mind. And fathers, trying to arrive at church unflustered, read their children tales that set their young souls alight with imagined worlds.