In my previous entry about what skills a student should learn to prepare for college (and for life), I discussed the need to develop reading skills.
That entry focused on fast reading--the kind that most of us do most of the time as that is what the glut of information coming at us from all sides encourages and, to some, or so it seems, demands. It is likely the kind of reading you are doing right now. But while fast reading may yield gists and piths, it will not, at least all that often, change the way you think. Slow reading will. Or should. And if it does, it means it will change your life.
In another post I listed Joseph Luzzi’s 10 commandments for reading. Today’s entry can be thought of as another attempt to underscore the need for the development of a passion for deep reading. My proof consists of quotes from two who have written books about this topic: David Mikics’ "Slow Reading in a Hurried Age" and Mark Edmundson’s "Why Read?"
This is not Mark’s first appearance on ths blog. His essay on how a student should approach learning in college was named one of the best essay of the year in 2012 and it is featured here. Mark and David are friends, which is fitting, as both agree that reading is not, as was once used as a tag line on TV spots, fundamental; rather, it is essential to living an examined life--something Socrates said was the only one worth living.
The Problem with fast reading
Constant Internet use hampers a young person’s readiness for the intense study habits that college requires.
Mikics, David (2013-10-08). Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
By putting a world of facts at the end of a key-stroke, computers have made facts, their command, their manipulation, their ordering, central to what now can qualify as humanistic education. The result is to suspend reflection about the differences among wisdom, knowledge, and information. Everything that can be accessed online can seem equal to everything else, no datum more important or more profound than any other. Thus the possibility presents itself that there really is no more wisdom; there is no more knowledge; there is only information. No thought is a challenge or an affront to what one currently believes.
Edmundson, Mark (2008-12-01). Why Read? . Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
In the brave new digital world, we are intent on speed rather than repetition and slow study. As a result, we have lost sight of the fact that reading well requires time and patience. This point can’t be repeated often enough. Book-length arguments and works of imaginative literature reveal themselves only over time. We must work hard to get more out of the books we read— and good books always reward slow-moving, careful attention. The point is a pedagogically necessary one as well. We are not doing our children any favors by encouraging the idea that everything they do should be easy, effortless, and quick. Too often these days, “research” for a high schooler, and often even a college student, means glancing at Wikipedia, doing a fast Google search, and cutting and pasting some quotations together. In the best-case scenario, the student will put quotation marks around the pasted passages: because of the Internet’s constant offers of ready-for-use text,
plagiarism is an ever-increasing plague. Bad writing, the mere assembling of sentences from the Net with some alterations or additions of one’s own, goes along with bad reading.
Mikics, David (2013-10-08). Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
The Internet presents a seemingly infinite volume of choices. But when we plunge into this electronic ocean of possibilities, we often feel that choice has been taken away from us. In contrast to a supermarket, the Net doesn’t usually ask you to pay for your choices; it proudly asserts that information is free. But the online abundance of possibilities fails to liberate. The Net rules us by demanding that we choose as much as we can, as frequently as we can, so that we don’t miss out on anything. This especially applies to the reading matter that makes its way onto the Internet. We have too many choices of things to read— or glance at. The result is Continuous Partial Attention (CPA), which occurs when we try to do too much at once. Linda Stone, who coined the term, explains that CPA is not the same as multitasking. When we multitask, she argues, we pair one activity that is fairly automatic with another that requires more attention. For example, we eat lunch while writing or making phone calls. The main activity— writing, talking on the phone— always remains our primary focus. Eating that sandwich won’t steal attention from our main task. CPA is different, Stone writes, because when it kicks in, we’re “motivated by a desire not to miss anything.” CPA instills in us a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With CPA, we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly scan for opportunities— activities or people— in any given moment… Continuous partial attention is an always on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that creates an artificial sense of crisis. We are always in high alert.
Mikics, David (2013-10-08). Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
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The benefits of slow reading
In Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, there is a passage that gets close to the core of what a literary education should be about. The passage offers a deep sense of what we can ask from a consequential book. Proust speaks with the kind of clarity that is peculiarly his about what he hopes his work will achieve. In particular, he reflects on the relation he wants to strike with his readers. "It seemed to me," he observes, "that they would not be 'my' readers but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his customers—it would be my book but with it I would furnish them the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I would not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether 'it really is like that.' whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written." What Proust is describing is an act of self-discovery on the part of his reader. Immersing herself in Proust, the reader may encounter aspects of herself that, while they have perhaps been in existence for a long time, have remained unnamed, undescribed, and therefore in a certain sense unknown. One might say that the reader learns the language of herself; or that she is humanly enhanced, enlarging the previously constricting circle that made up the border of what she's been. One might also say, using another idiom, one that has largely passed out of circulation, that her consciousness has been expanded....Emerson, a writer Proust admired, attributes to the ideal student he describes in "The American Scholar": "One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.' There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world."
For Emerson, the reader can do more than discover the language of herself in great writing. Emerson's reader uses a book as an imaginative goad. He can begin compounding visions of experience that pass beyond what's manifest in the book at hand. This, presumably, is what happened when Shakespeare read Holinshed's Chronicles or even Plutarch's Lives. These are major sources for the plays, yes, but in reading them Shakespeare made their sentences doubly significant, and the sense of their authors as broad as the world...."Reading," Proust says in a circumspect mood, "is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it; it does not constitute it."
Edmundson, Mark (2008-12-01). Why Read?. Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition
The great English Romantic critic William Hazlitt advocated reading with gusto. To read well requires appetite. My primary advice to you, always, is to be hearty in your desire for the written word, and to keep your sense of fun. Reading should not be drudgery, and not mere escape either,
but a form of life lived at a higher pitch. Properly done, it offers you, as Harold Bloom insists, more life: more people than you could ever meet, more intense visions of love and fate, bliss and woe than are likely to come your way otherwise. . The universe that the great authors made vies with the created world for pungent variation, for beauty and darkness, for the novelty that makes us admire. Through the unbounded energy of words, it gives you surprise, the most valuable of gifts. And it’s always open to you, every moment. The books are waiting.
Mikics, David. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age. Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
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I am well aware that my cutting and pasting of these texts should be categorized under the part of the problem section of this entry. What has been even more unsettling (and this is what reading does), I have just finished reading Dave Eggers' new book “The Circle”. Eggers’ critically acclaimed book takes place in the not too distant future. A company modeled on Google and Facebook, provides the background and the action for a plot that centers on the way humans begin to live their lives through the connections they have with media. Eggers updates what Big Brother was in Orwell’s 1984. The seemingly benign Circle actually encloses us and limits any form of personal freedom. It is frightening and has spoken t me personally. It took me a while to write this entry and to read the book. In between, I have been commenting on various websites, updating my Facebook page, sending tweets, answering many emails, responding to texts, watching YouTube videos and listening o playlists on Spotify. I have been busy, but I have been tied to my computer, phone, and kindle. There’s been little time for actual conversation with people face to face. I know that my predicament is not unique and that is what Eggars, Edmundson, and Mikics worry about. We, as a species, are losing touch with touch, the feel and smell of a age as it turns, the sound of a voice across a table, and the sight of the mountains on a late fall day. But I don’t think the apocalypse is near. Instead, I think some of us need to earn to find the time to live well in the world and the word.
I hope that some of these words, mine or those of others, will encourage at least a few readers to pursue the way of the slow, even if you have read this entry quickly.
Aesop highlighted how the tortoise defeats the hare. Isaiah Berlin updated the animals and the skillsets with his fox and hedgehog approach to learning and being. This latter day fable will help me structure part 3 of my overview of the skills necessary to become a thinker who gets the most out of her education.
“How you read matters much more than how much you read.”
David Mikics
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