Minds like empty rooms

In his comment on my earlier post titled I am not alone in saying what I do, Nishant Kamath mentioned Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (it makes me wince to think there are people in the world who don't know that and don't care), now 86, saying 'Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books' (People like J. K. Rowling, Shilpi, Abhirup and I hope a few million others around the world will understand what she means, Nishant, the full import of it that is...)

Harper Lee only ever wrote one book in her whole life. It has been voted as the greatest novel of the 20th century. I shall not go into superlatives - they have been so incredibly cheapened that they don't really mean anything any more anyway - but I sometimes say that the world is divided between those who have read (and loved-) To Kill a Mockingbird and those who have not. It is good to have someone like that on one's side as one fights the forces of enveloping darkness. Minds like empty rooms. Let's not forget the phrase. Some day decades or centuries hence, when some people try to figure out just why men became slaves of machines and were forced into underground dungeons to live like blind worms (see the concluding pages of H. G. Wells' The Time Machine), they might discover that the rot started when people in the mass stopped reading books, and their minds became like empty rooms.