I had seen talking films as a graduate student, along with the handful of others who were interested in such things. But the films—The Magnificent Ob… - Walter Tevis

"What is it exactly that you do with a book?"
"You read it."
"Oh," she said. And then, "What does read mean?"
I nodded. Then I began turning the pages of the book I was holding and said, "Some of these markings here represent sounds. And the sounds make words. You look at the marks and sounds come into your mind and, after you practice long enough, they begin to sound like hearing a person talking. Talking—but silently."

Why don’t we talk to one another? Why don’t we huddle together against the cold wind that blows down the empty streets of this city? Once, long ago, there were private telephones in New York. People talked to one another then—perhaps distantly, strangely, with their voices made thin and artificial by electronics, but they talked. Of the price of groceries, the presidential elections, the sexual behavior of their teen-age children, their fear of the weather and their fear of death. And they read, hearing the voices of the living and the dead speaking to them in eloquent silence, in touch with a babble of human talk that must have filled the mind in a manner that said; I am human. I talk and I listen and I read.
Why can no one read? What happened?

I was in a state of yearning, and I had been for years. I was not happy—had almost never been happy.
This is terrible! I thought. All those lies! I felt physically sick to see it all: to see myself slack-jawed as a child in front of the television, to see myself in classes being told by robot teachers that “inward development” was the aim of life, that “quick sex is best,” that the only reality was in my consciousness and that it could be altered chemically. What I had wanted, what I had yearned for even then, was to be loved. And to love. And they had not even taught me the word.