Nestled in a café-bar-museum-event space in Fort Mason — San Francisco’s water-front, weathered military campus with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge —is a floor to ceiling library housing the Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilisation. A crowd-curated collection of the 3,500 books “most essential to sustain or rebuild a civilisation,” the Manual for Civilisation began with one question: If you were stranded on an island (or small hostile planetoid), what books would you want to have with you?

The collection, displayed along industrial walls, is both solemn and optimistic, earnest and futile, a romantic’s bookish Golden Record. It is, most vividly, a humbling monument to historian Barbara Tuchman’s proclamation that “Books are the carriers of civilisation.” “Without books,” Tuchman wrote, “the development of civilisation would have been impossible.”

Linking civilisation and human culture to books, reading and writing is not unique to Tuchman.

Writing nearly 350 years earlier, Galileo had declared books “the seal of all the admirable inventions of mankind,” because books allow us to communicate through time and place, and to speak to those “who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years.”

A few generations later, Henry David Thoreau, writing in the seclusion of Walden Pond, wrote that “books are the treasured wealth of the field and the fit inheritance of generations and culture.”

The following generation, Carl Sagan, after taking his TV audience on a journey through the cosmos, found himself alone in a library, circling back to Galileo. With the Cavatina — one of two Beethoven songs floating in space on the Voyager II’s Golden Record — playing, Sagan marvelled at the existence of books. “Writing,” he says, “is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.” “A book,” he concludes, “is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Tuchman’s platitude, then, has persisted through the centuries: Books carry civilisation. Not because they are inherently sacred objects of inherently sacred knowledge, but because reading and writing assemble and shape culture. And without culture, there is no civilisation.

In Arabic, the root word for civilisation — ح-ض-ر: to be present, to settle, to remain — expresses a profound shift from wandering to dwelling. For Islam, that shift began with a search at the boundary between city and desert.

1,450 years ago, looking down at the Kaaba from 2,000 feet up, and over two miles away, a wanderer in search of a spiritual dwelling was commanded to Read. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ responded, “I am not a reader.” He was commanded again, Read. Again the Holy Prophet responded, “I am not a reader.” The command came once more. Read in the Name of your Lord who created.

So much has been said about Islam’s origin story — codified through humanity’s most rigorous and sophisticated system of oral preservation — that one hesitates to reference it in an essay about reading. Yet, it is with this divine command that the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus began the story of Islamic civilisation. Read in the Name of your Lord who created.

To command an unlettered man to Read unsettles the essential pillar that reading is largely, or exclusively, the one dimensional act of decoding printed symbols. The Arabic word, “Iqra,” often translated as to “read” contains a curious ambiguity — it simultaneously means “to read” and “to recite.” To recite is to engage in a primarily oral act, externally expressive. To read is to engage in something more private and solitary, internally reflective.

The Read of Islam’s originating verse embodies, as Alan Jacobs succinctly puts it in Pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distractions, “a moving between the solitary encounter and something more social.” In the context of modern reading, social can be anything — a journal entry, a blog post, a book club, a literary salon, a dignified virtual debate, a letter to a friend — because, Jacobs writes, “every good idea ever achieved is the product of both connection and contemplation, of moving back and forth between the two.”

If reading does not flow outward to build and contribute to the living networks of human knowledge, the divine command to Read feels hamstrung, unfulfilled.

Reading alone however — even with its duality — is not enough. The Quran’s command to read has a direction.

Read in the Name of Your Lord who Created. Created humans from a clinging clot. Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous, Who taught by the pen—taught humanity what they knew not.

The command to Read in the name of our Creator confers — as Rebecca Elson put in “We Astronomers,” a poem about resisting disenchantment — a “responsibility to awe.” The Quranic Read could be interpreted as a responsibility to awe. It is an invitation to learn with both disciplined inquiry, and receptive wonder.

Over the last century, our responsibility to awe has been a source of anxiety.

In 1926 — the year the radio, a dizzying new addition to the American home, brought the World Series to living rooms across the country; the year Bell Telephone perfected transcontinental calls from New York to San Francisco for $18; the year the Orpheum Theatre opened in Los Angeles, its legendary neon sign still shining today—Virginia Woolf worried about the future of reading.

In the August 3, 1926 edition of The New Republic, Woolf, comparing cinema to reading, is unsettled and nearly disgusted by the horror of the cinema. The cinema, she writes, and the pleasure we derive from it, emanates from an impulse so unrefined in its humanity, it is anti-civilisational. Woolf, the quintessential sombre optimist who famously wrote that “the future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think” in January 1915, does not go so far as to condemn the future of reading, but she concludes the audio-visual dangerously erodes depth.

25 years later, in 1951 — the year I Love Lucy debuted, replacing the family radio with a wooden TV box set; the year of House Un-American Activities Committee; the year of the first nuclear tests in the Nevada desert; the last year before the death of technicolour in 1952 — E.B. White, beloved children’s book author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, worries about the future of reading.

In the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” White reflected on the Rollins College President’s prediction that