Reading Is Never a Waste of Time

Barry Seaman’s claim that reading is never a waste of time is grounded not in an abstract celebration of books but in the hours he read in prison, sometimes by light leaking through the bars. Reading gives him a useful activity when isolation and confinement seem to make usefulness scarce; it becomes a way to think, connect, and recover peace.

The Claim and Its Context

Seaman introduces reading as one of the body’s and mind’s genuine needs, contrasting it with fashionable things imposed as markers of class. After urging the church audience to eat well, he turns from food to books and asks them not to spend so much time watching television. He specifically recommends books by Black writers, but insists that reading should not stop there: his larger contribution is the principle that reading itself is worthwhile.

The claim is deliberately broad, yet Seaman makes it credible through a particular history. He says that he began reading in jail and went through books rapidly. His defense is therefore not a critic’s judgment from outside prison, but testimony about a practice that mattered under conditions he knew firsthand.

Reading in Prison

When the prison lights went out early, Seaman lay in bed hearing footsteps and people yelling. He describes the cell as a place where cold and heat could be felt together, a sign, as he puts it, of loneliness or sickness. Thinking about pleasant things did not always help. Reading offered another course of action amid those sounds and sensations.

At times a guard’s lamp, or fluorescent light from a corridor, reached his cell. Seaman picked up his book and read in that uncertain light. The letters and paragraphs seemed frenzied or spooked in the underground world of the prison, but he persisted: sometimes reading quickly, sometimes slowly, as if each sentence or word could nourish the whole body as well as the brain. He could continue for hours without dwelling on the fact that he was imprisoned for standing up for his brothers, most of whom, he says, might not care whether he rotted there. In that setting, reading gave him a task he could recognize as useful even when the surrounding institution offered little comfort.

What Reading Makes Possible

Seaman expands the word “reading” into a sequence of human activities: thinking, praying, talking with a friend, expressing one’s ideas, listening to other people’s ideas, listening to music, looking at a view, and walking on a beach. The list puts solitary reading beside forms of exchange and attention. A book can be read alone, but the act is not presented as sealed off from other people or from the world; it resembles conversation, listening, and looking.

That breadth also gives the declaration its force. Seaman does not claim that reading frees him from prison or removes the loneliness of confinement. Instead, it lets him do something meaningful within those conditions. The repeated insistence that he was doing something useful answers the noise, the bars, and his uncertainty about how much his sacrifice mattered to those he defended. Reading has value because it remains an available practice when other measures of value fail.

The Book That Restored Peace

Asked what he read, Seaman answers that he read everything, then recalls one book from one of the most desperate moments of his life: An Abridged Digest of the Complete Works of Voltaire. He says that the book brought him peace again and was useful to him. The recollection supplies a concrete limit and proof for the larger claim: not every book is described, and no universal cure is promised, but one particular book mattered at a moment when Seaman needed it.

The movement from the general principle to that remembered title closes the argument in personal terms. Reading is never a waste of time because, in Seaman’s experience, it can occupy the mind, sustain attention, and restore a measure of peace. Its usefulness is neither fashionable display nor an abstract ideal; it is what a reader can do with a book in the light available.