On Reading

I think a lot about reading–and not just my reading, but reading in general and how fascinating and miraculous an activity it is. I think about how reading (and writing, of course) has been used to transmit ideas from one generation to another, encompassing thousands of years. In fact, on my spacier days, I’ve even considered writing/reading a kind of alternate existence. Certainly it’s common to think of reading as a way of time travel, or as a way of living a life completely different from one’s own, but this isn’t quite what I mean by “alternate existence.” I’m talking about writing/reading as an actual different life form.

Bear with me, because this view requires some athletic imaginative leaps, but I think it’s worth it, if only to defamiliarize ourselves with writing/reading as an everyday function and look at it in a new light. To make my view clear, I need to start with a crazy premise: writing is a life form in and of itself. Think of it like this: you’re in a Star Trek Universe, and you’ve met another life form that you can’t see or touch, but you know it’s there. You can see its effects on the physical environment. So naturally, you have to expand your notion of what a life form is in order to identify and describe this one.

Now that I’ve prepared the way, let me make my argument for writing as an alternative life form. When human beings began to write their thoughts and stories down, they took the first step towards creating a different form of life, one made of the intersection of thought and the squiggly lines we call writing, grafted onto paper in a process similar to how lichens occurred: a fungus and an alga got together and, through symbiosis, united to create a new, independent life form that has characteristics of both its predecessors. How is writing like that? Take human ideas and stories, graft them onto the remnants of trees, and you get something that didn’t exist before: books. And these books, as we all know, go on to have lives of their own. They influence human events long after their initial publication dates; they take on a kind of incorporeal existence that despite its lack of physical substance, nevertheless exerts an effect not only on individual people, but on whole cultures. In a science fiction-type way, these creations could be seen as having some kind of life, although of course we’d have to define life differently to get there.

I’m not really arguing this, although I confess I do think it’s fascinating to delve into this way of looking at books and writing. I’m simply suggesting it as a thought experiment to help us see reading/writing as the kind of miracle it really is. For one thing, all the forms of long distance and long term communications we enjoy today are derivatives of this writing/reading model. This electronic blog you’re reading right now comes directly from papyrus sheets and Gutenberg. That TikTok video you watched and laughed at on Instagram this morning? Though admittedly transformed, it’s also the honest descendant of the first books compiled by Greeks, Romans, Babylonians. In fact, I would argue that human existence probably remained pretty static, with minimal changes from generation to generation, until the advent and spread of reading and writing, which allowed communication unfettered by place and time, and this in turn allowed men and women to improve upon the ideas and practices of the past, giving rise to steady change until we got to where we are today.

So why is this important? As I said, I think it’s an interesting thought experiment, but it’s more than that. When we talk about writing and reading these days, we tend to think about the publishing world: what’s getting published, what’s been published, who’s reading what, who’s writing what. The emphasis seems to be on the book, not the reader. I’d like more people to take the opportunity to look at the act of reading to see what a miracle it is, and by extension, how we can refine our reading skills to become better, more thoughtful readers. C.S. Lewis (who I’d argue is horribly undersold as the author of the Narnia series and low-grade Christian propaganda) suggested in a little book called An Experiment in Criticism that we divide readers into two categories: “Users” and “Consumers.” A user, if I remember correctly, is a reader who thoughtfully reads a book and considers it seriously. A consumer simply reads a book and sets it aside. It is the most common thing in the world for a user to re-read a book not once but several time, whereas a consumer will not re-read a book unless s/he has forgotten the plot. Users make use of their reading; consumers use their reading as mere escapism.

I don’t mean to bash reading as escapism; it has its time and its place and can be very useful, even healing. I’d rather focus instead on making all readers capable of both kinds of reading. In short, I’d argue for teaching reading not as it is taught now, as a basic skill required of all citizens, but rather as a higher level thinking skill, one which demands interaction with the text.

And here we return to the idea of the act of reading as a special miracle, one which somehow unites written thoughts from previous ages and long-dead writers, from disparate places and situations, with a reader who is enriched by experiencing different points of view, different ideas, and, to be succinct, completely different existences. Think of it this way: last week I read a book by Georges Simenon, a detective novel featuring Inspector Maigret, in French. I am not bilingual, not even fluent in French, although it’s true that I majored in it in college (about forty years ago!). But I could make my way through the novel and follow the plot for the most part. The situations and characters were conveyed to me in a language completely foreign from my own. That, I think, qualifies as a kind of miracle. When we read works in their original languages, when we slow down to enter the world of the text, whether it’s Beowulf or Candide, we engage with the text in a way that simply takes us out of our world into a completely different one. And when we return to our own world, we see with different eyes, think with a different mind. It is reading that makes this possible, since it provides us with a gift that for much of human existence has been absolutely unthinkable: the gift of transcending our own private existence.

Can we expect to make the most of such a gift with just the basic tools of reading? Shouldn’t we work harder to deserve this gift and enjoy it in all its glory?

Ah–but the question is how to do this. I have no doubt that if we start thinking about this and addressing it, we will come up with many different answers, some of which I hope to consider in future blogs. Until then, we can always improve with practice!

Happy Reading!