ART, LITERATURE, POETRY AND MORE ·
Ray Bradbury never went to college. He spent his youth in the libraries of Los Angeles, reading every book he could get his hands on until he claimed he had finally graduated from the stacks. He believed that the library was the only true university, a place where the soul of humanity was preserved in ink and paper.
He famously observed: A culture dies when people stop reading.
This was not a warning about government censorship, but about the voluntary abandonment of the mind. Bradbury feared that as we moved toward faster, shallower forms of entertainment, we would lose the patience required for deep thought. To him, a book was a living thing—a conversation across time that keeps a civilization sane. When that conversation stops, the culture itself begins to wither.
And the warning words of his fellow SF writer, Isaac Asimov:
