A Preliminary Effort Towards a Theory of Reading

In Which I Shoot Some Frail Arrows into a Great Mystery

“ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος.”

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

― John 1:1

“We read, frequently if not unknowingly, in search of a mind more original than our own.”

― Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

― Mortimer J. Adler

“Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.”

― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book

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The more you know, the more you know how much you don’t know, you know? A new acquaintance of mine was recently lamenting the vast sea of books he wished to read in the light of our necessarily finite ability to read them. I sympathize completely. When physical bookstores were a common thing, I used to walk into them and feel primarily despair. What hope is there to engage even a minuscule fraction of humanity’s historical library? From a certain vantage point, none. For a particular sensitive type of soul like myself or my new friend, bookstores may as well emblazon above their doors the warning Dante found adorning the entrance to Hell. Throughout most of my twenties (I am now thirty-three), this was just about all I could see when venturing out for a new book. While my love and desire was sincere, at least in part, my primary orientation was one of anxiety. So much to read, so little time (if you’ll permit me a tired cliché). Honestly, I wasn’t able at the time to think any other way.

Now, you loyal regular readers will know by now that I’m an open Christian. I point this out in this context for a fairly simple reason. To wit, I now endeavor to organize my life around the principles of humility and death-to-self that Jesus teaches. Of course I often fail miserably at this, but by the grace of God I have been able to change the way I view a lot of common occurrences in life, not just the lofty spiritual ones. What I’ve settled on in the past few years is that my former attitude toward reading described above was very selfish. If my new friend should read this essay, I say to you, sir, that I’m casting no aspersion here. I hope that what I am about to explore will be helpful in your eminently noble pursuit. For I feel that the desire to read well and deeply is a beautiful and worthy cause. I will go so far as to say that it is a quest without which the human soul withers and is choked out by the vagaries of our coetaneous woes. Without regular relationship with the timeless, we become trapped in the eternal present, where all is sameness and ennui.

What is Reading?, The Straightforward Version

Leaving aside a lot of technical work in linguistics of which I’m reasonably ignorant, I’d say that reading in its most basic definition is a technological extension of listening to someone talk. By corollary, I’d say that writing is technologically extended speech. In essence what we are doing when we read is listening to someone talk (their writing), released to a large degree from the limits of time and space. In fact, the brilliant Mortimer Adler called deep and historically informed reading “The Great Conversation”. For now, let us leave it there. We’ll return to the “what?” shortly.

Why Read?, Pars Una

Now we are the core of the issue, at least in the popular mind. And I say the popular answer is entirely wrongheaded. Yet, it is an answer I would have given even six years ago. The answer in question is: “to improve myself”. I submit that I was guilty giving this answer to myself and others, yet in a slightly more sophisticated form. So, let us say for analytical purposes that the reason for reading can be divided into the simple answer, the sophisticated answer, and the real answer. Let us treat each in turn, arriving at dual reprisals of “what” reading is and “why” we do it, in light of our exploration.

What I’m calling “the simple answer” is the reason most people read at all these days. “How will this make my life better?” Usually this venture is defined in terms of what can loosely be grouped under the umbrella of “getting ahead”. Hence, you will see in many online public forums the usual rotation of “great books” that revolve entirely around economic and personal psychological success. Do more, get more, be more, be happier, be more attractive, outwit the others. This sort of thing. I won’t call out the names of such books because you are likely already painfully aware of what they are. However, they share a common feature and that is, “what will it do for me?”. This mentality is so stultifying to the heart and mind that you will even see it suggested that reading the books in question is unnecessary and you can simply resort to reading summaries of the “lessons” contained in them. Now, this ironically is not the worst advice when it comes to these sorts of books. They offer little to nothing in the way of literary quality and often are just “listicles” padded out with useless and poorly composed anecdotes and dubious “studies” and “expert opinions”. A good heuristic is that if the book could have conveyed its contents in the form of a blog post, it probably should have, and spared us the use of valuable paper production resources.

Part and parcel of the attitude in question here is the obsession with the quantity of books read. Die-hards keep lists to not-so-humble brag about the volume of writing they have consumed (like locusts), and the extensive “lessons” that they have amassed. To these poor lost souls, I have in reply only the first quotation from Dr. Adler in this piece’s epigraph. What precisely “get through to you” means, we’ll address in our look at the third form of reading I’ve proposed.

Another sad feature of this sort of orientation to reading is that proponents and partakers eschew entirely the reading of fiction. The argument goes that stories are of no avail in teaching you anything productive or, especially, lucrative. This is likely false to begin with, but even were it true, it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of reading. I think I have never quite been in this category of reader, perhaps due to a more artistic temperament. This is a double-edged sword though, as I see the sophisticated version of this position as perhaps more insidious than the obviously selfish “simple” version, which is at least straightforward in its literal and figurative avarice.

The Soul-Costs of Selfishness

You have probably ascertained about me that I believe there to be quite a lot of lost meaning hidden in the plain sight of our everyday language. Have you ever wondered why the idea of “self-consciousness” has such a negative connotation? And yet the success “literature” is comprised of an all-consuming focus on yourself and nothing else. There is occasionally some lip-service paid to “giving back” or what have you, but usually in the manner of some clever ploy to trick the universe or God into increasing some aspect of yourself in turn. And still we say that the self-conscious person is not quite in their right mind. It’s something we all seem to know implicitly but have trouble giving voice to. We all have the sense that care for others is important, and yet are usually unwilling to do the work to unpack what precisely that means in practice. Hence, the plague-like phenomenon known as virtue signaling. All the benefits of being a good person with none of the work, ostensibly. And the primary reason such behavior rings hollow is that it is still manifestly all about me. Others are seen only, perhaps unconsciously, as a means to self-enlargement. In the state of virtue signaling, I see others as objects to enhance my own goodness, as opposed to treating them deservedly as subjects with their own ends and personality that are potential opportunities for relationship.

The sick irony of all this in the realm of reading is that, by proceeding in the manner I describe in the last section, you objectify yourself by necessity. You transform yourself in to an extruded project, to be tinkered with and perfected. And most of all, you make yourself a thing whose end is hedonistic pleasure extraction. This is what I’ve just called the “soul-cost”. You make yourself less than human by the pursuit of the things you think you want. It is an attitude of greed and ultimately hubris. I say the latter because what is at root here is that you see yourself in this state of reading as the supreme end of life and the value of all creative works is defined by the degree to which it will enrich your Self. “Self-help” indeed. It is a poison.

Still, I’m not here to rant against that material per se. Read it if you wish. There are at least a handful of books with good business information and even, sigh, “mindset” principles. There is nothing wrong with valuing ourselves or wanting to be successful. The problem is in deeply understanding what that even means. If you were given $10M tomorrow, what then would you do? Would you keep reading “success” books? If so, how about $1B? If you had more money than you could fathom, what then? Proper reading offers answers to these questions. This is because real reading, and stories in particular, function primarily in the moral dimension. In other words, they deal with how we should act. I mean moral in the general sense of the dimension that isn’t informed by the empirical sciences. There is nothing in biology that tells you what you ought to do, on the day-in, day-out basis. There are some ends prescribed by staunch evolutionary psychology views, but frankly, I don’t find them even worthy of consideration here. I regard the field as a pseudo-science, though you are free to disagree with me.

Insidious Reading

Now, lest you think I am merely picking off easy targets from my ivory tower, I’d like to tell you how I viewed reading for over a decade and pronounce myself even more guilty than the hustle-culture readers. And beyond being a basic confession, I hope to shine a light on this condition that we might proceed to the highest level of true reading. The trap I will describe presently is a great obstacle to enjoying the practice of reading. And enjoyment of reading is a crucial factor in making the practice an indispensable part of our lives.

I call this view insidious because what has changed in the second stage is the material in question, while the fundamental orientation remains on the level of selfish ends. One can approach the real “Great Books” with the same greedy attitude of “what can this do for me?”. And you may then be self-deceived into believing you are involved in a higher level activity while the rot proceeds apace. There is no deep difference in attempting to read as many classic works of philosophy in order to improve oneself than there is in undertaking the same task with a view to material enrichment. You could argue that it is a better pursuit because the works in question are better, but I think in retrospect this attempt is likely even more damaging to the human spirit. It is difficult to understand why before one has made progress into the realm of true reading, but let us have a few more words on it before we go there.

What I personally did was read the canon of Great Books in order to be smarter, in plain terms. To appear educated, to get a leg up on others in “what really matters, to become enlightened, or some other such nonsense. But the fact remained that I was elevating myself to the ultimate end. The feeling I had was always of taking and so, unsurprisingly, I found the attempt largely dissatisfying and unfulfilling. It is possible to overcome this affliction without the aid of religion, but I recommend religion to you for no other reason than it was the only thing that snapped me out of this trance I languished in for many years. My faith has taught me that there are a great many things in life more important than myself. This is not strictly a Christian teaching and perhaps ironically, the reading of Great Books might wake you up to this fact by way of sheer artistic force. I’ll write someday more personally about my journey into reading, but the pretense with which I embarked at the very least had me engaging the material that can affect this change of view.

This is all to say that you can never really read a book if all you think about is what it will do for you, or because you should, or because it generally regarded as great, or any other such externally motivated reason.

What is Reading?, The Relationship Question

We have previously established that reading can be rightly viewed as a technologically extended conversation. And of the things that make up a relationship between persons, conversation is a pinnacle factor. When you are seeking to relate to someone, you speak with them. The pedant may argue that reading involves only listening, and yet this denies the metaphysical dimension that defines any truly spiritual endeavor. See, even if I am primarily the recipient of some speech, what I must bring is my care and attention. Your attention is perhaps the ultimate means of creating a relationship. To pay your attention to someone is to give them the highest thing you have to offer. Relationship at its height is to simply be with someone.

And so, I propose that true reading is the cultivation of a relationship. Real reading is seeking to enter into an I-Thou relationship with another person who is telling you a story or offering you a teaching about life itself. And the crucial point here is that relationships require something of you. They demand a sacrifice of some kind. I don’t mean this is a negative sense that we should bemoan. I mean it in the modest technical sense that we must give time and attention that could potentially be used in other ways, and that once given, is irretrievable. We offer up something inherently valuable to the other. And if there be any gain, it is not usually in the realm of the tangible. While I have been married a relatively short amount of time, I submit that if you get married thinking about what you can get out of the other person, you’re on the fast track to divorce. A relationship based on love is not a utilitarian proposition. Of all things, love is perhaps the most “useless”. And yet it is the most essential. It is thing we are all seeking, barring some terrible derangement.

When we love something, we are earnestly concerned with its promotion, cultivation, preservation. And this guileless approach is the one we must make toward a great work of literature, if we are to relate to it properly.

Why Read?, Redux

I gave the quotation from the first line of John’s Gospel for this reason: the word in Greek “λόγος” (Logos) that we translate to English as Word has a rich tradition in philosophy. One of the pages’ worth of definitions, usually traced to the Sophist school, is “discourse”. Talking, if you will. It has myriad meaning clustered about it, but Word is decent enough if you’ll spend a few minutes in a Greek concordance. John’s identification of λόγος with God is something not unique to Christianity. The unique Christian propositions come a few verses later in dealing with the doctrine of Incarnation. The straightforward assertion of John 1:1 would have found no disagreement with the ancient Greek world. It is a statement that could have just as easily come from Aristotle, and in fact does, in so many different words.

What I’m getting at is that many incredibly wise people in human history have perceived the inextricable link between language and Reality itself. The Hebrews record God as speaking the world into existence. This phenomenon is mirrored in no small number of other world mythologies. In some smaller way, when a lone human soul creates something new (never ex nihilo of course) by the medium of language, he is participating in the very act that issued forth the universe itself. When we come into relationship with this selfsame power, our first and proper response should be as Dr. Adler offers in the second quotation from the epigraph above. If we find in ourselves anything short of Wonder, we may rightly ask what is the fault in us. And as I have vehemently stated, the fault is likely greed or pride, and often both. We must take an honest look at ourselves when standing before a work like Macbeth to see what reaction it produces in us. I argue reverence should be paramount. If we find envy, or anxiety, or an eagerness for “practical application”, I fear we have placed ourselves again at the center of the universe and need a Copernican revolution of the soul.

And if we revere something appropriately, if we wonder at it, if we are awed by its majesty and mystery, the stance of the clean heart is naturally love. I stop short of worship as a Christian, and there is danger in worshiping art as a god, idolatry of all kinds is a ruinous road, but a deep and perhaps even positively disturbing reverence is a good posture. The Great Works, in a sense, judge you, not the other way round. They do not offer you a way to pursue your desires. They fundamentally reshape what it is you desire in the first place. And ideally, they change your heart into the sort of thing that naturally pursues Goodness, and Beauty, and Truth. This is what it means to let a book “get through to you”, as Adler advises.

If we adopt this vision, we now come to books not in an attempt to take what we can and abscond with unjust gain, but to offer our frail selves to something greater than us. I believe that if we ask the question “what can I bring to this work?”, we will find our experience of reading transformed. And thereby we will find our lives transformed. And I also believe that God will speak to us in relationship through this practice. I do not believe that He is present in such Great Works the way He is in the Bible, but I maintain the view just the same. God is not contained in a book, just as he was not contained in the Temple that Solomon built, though I take Him to be available in these places in a unique and irreplaceable way. If you don’t believe in such things, I still think you may derive an important allegorical meaning from what I’m saying. What you confront in a Great Book is the same presence you confront in your dealing with Life and with other people that are experiencing it with you. And the call is to love these things, not exploit them.

By way of so-called practical advice, I say the following: Take your time. We don’t rush through a dinner with a loved one in search of the next experience or compulsively mine it for “lessons”. We simply enjoy it. And if we gain anything, it is a deep refreshment of the spirit and the peace that comes from a strengthened bond of love. To treat such an experience otherwise is to do it violence and demean the other person terribly.

So in sum, I believe our pursuit is rightly to be the elevation of reading to its former glory of “The Great Conversation”. And if we will patiently speak with the great creations of our forebears, we will not find ourselves “improved”, but radically reoriented. Transfigured even, into the sort of creatures we are meant to be. At this great mystery our final words must humbly be:

Wonder and Love