The Power Of Reading

I was in my early twenties when
I first had fantasies of being a monk,
little realising how much my family
made such a fantasy attractive
whilst cutting off the possibility
of any such idea of a life.

I read many books, much to my family
disapproval: they watched a lot of television,
where I preferred to consume music instead. 
Televison was controlled by the government,
and the provisions of  the family life I knew
bore all the echoes of life under the duress
of rationing, whilst with the music that I found,
the albums for sale in junk shops and woolworths,
there may well have been  and absence of thought
but I saw less sign of externally applied limitation.
.
It was through one of the books my family disliked
that I read about the three knots on the waist ropes 
that Franciscan monks tied their tunics with,
and about the simple elegance of understanding
of what each knot meant in relation to the vows
the monks took to a maintian a singular dedication.

In fhe days of cloth hankerchiefs
it was common to tie a knot in one corner
of the square to remind the owner of something
that was meant to be remembered, later. 

So it was with the three knots in a monks
waist ropes, the first was to remind the wearer
of their comitment to celibacy, the second
to remind the wearer of their promise to poverty
and the third know to remind the wearer
of their commitmen to humility through service.

As a summary reponce to the temptations
that the world offered how the reminder
was built into their clothing appealed to me.
The title of the book that explained all this
was, quite simply, 'Money Sex and Power'. 

The book remains in print, and has its place
in social media where it is still read today.
The author, Richard Foster, cut through
many unecessary arguments for the reader
with his logical explanations for how
presentations of money sex and power
can be simplified, to improve how life is understood.

Although Christian in intent,
atheists can adapt Foster's logic
to resist the pressure of certain
sales pitchs, when they want to.    

How Much Do I Owe to Adverts For Products I Never Bought?

As a 70's teenager I was starved of reading
that might extend my understanding
of the complexities of the world,
the more to make me companionable.

The word 'adult' was euphemised to describe
the girlie magazines that married men justified
buying in secret and hiding from their wives,
where their secretive reading, if that is what it was,
led them deeper into a male juvenilia
which was as rhetorical as it was profitable
to the publisher, not that anyone said so.

I could never fathom how deep
the mutual dishonesty went, there
or what the profit motive destroyed. 
I rarely got near that stuff, though I sensed
from my family how often when male want
faced off against female rejection, the discussions
led to disgusts that were always too disagreeable 
for children's tender ears to understand. 

What I read were my mother's women's magazines
which supposedly reflected how women thought,
from the headlines on the front through to the articles inside.
But fifty years on, I have at last been corrected.

With those magazines what the advertiser had to sell
had to be cheap, for Mother to think she might want it,
which then set the agenda of the articles being defined
by what rich men did not want working class women to know.

The days of mass circulation of print media,
narrowing down what people might learn
have been reversed, thankfully, thru how much
the self made programmes on YouTube
are supported by adverts, where the breadth of opinion
is that vast nobody knows where it is likely to end.