We never stop reading the world and others. Alberto Manguel demonstrated this in *A History of Reading*, pointing out that, before being decipherers of books, we are readers of faces, gestures, skies, and traces: reading is our primary way of inhabiting reality, and all reading, as Roger Chartier taught, does not receive a pre-existing meaning, but rather produces it. Thus, in some way, reading is always, for better or for worse, a creative practice. But not all reading is the same. There is an appropriative, possessive, and domineering reading on the part of the reader, and an enslaving reading on the part of the one who is read without the participation of their freedom; and there is a contemplative reading, a contemplation that invites respect and care. Perhaps the moral destiny of our time is at stake between these two.