The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

All of these people can read, of course. Those who never have done so can learn, and those who have lost the habit can reacquire it.

At the purely cognitive level, this is what reading is: coding and decoding.

It should be normal for us to read what we want to read, to read what we truly enjoy reading.

We may well wonder if there are other books—or other kinds of books than the ones we typically prefer—that might give us pleasure or edification or both.

So whim cannot be everything. My whim may take me to the same books always, but I am confronted by that iron-clad Law of Diminishing Returns. I simply must turn elsewhere, to seek out alternatives, even if, like Neil Gaiman contemplating Narnia, I know that no alternative can match the Real Thing that I most love. So what do I do?

All novels are sequels; influence is bliss.”

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.

It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.

This is why attentiveness is worth cultivating: not just because it is good for you or because (as Gallagher also says) it can help you “organize your world,” but because such raptness is deeply satisfying.

You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function.

How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.

A Tale of a Tub

“The title was so odd, that my curiosity was excited. I had the [threepence the book cost], but then, I could have no supper.”

“eye-on-the-object look.”

Ruined by Reading,

But really, the cultivation of attentiveness has always been hard for human beings: as long as we have had readers we have had readers frustrated by their inability to concentrate. It is the nature of the human beast.

Furthermore, Hugh says, the reader who makes progress in these matters should beware of the dangers of pride—the source of intellectual snobbery—because pride can cause you to look down on other readers and simultaneously prevent you from striving toward greater skill and knowledge.

the plasticity of the human brain allows for major retraining, and adaptation to changing circumstances, both internal (in case of injury and disease) and external (in case of changing cognitive environments).

Plastic does not mean elastic, in other words.

These changes have had enormous social consequences, but for our purposes here the one that matters is this: from 1945 to 2000 or thereabouts, far more people than ever before in human history were expected to read, understand, appreciate, and even enjoy books.

The extreme reader, to coin a phrase, is a rare bird indeed. (“I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing,” Lynne Sharon Schwartz writes. “Can I go back to my books now?”)

Such people are born, not made, I think; or mostly born and only a little made.

“What we have loved, / Others will love,” wrote Wordsworth, “and we will teach them how.” A noble sentiment! Inspiring!

“Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.”

Rarely has education been about teaching children, adolescents, or young adults how to read lengthy and complicated texts with sustained, deep, appreciative attention—at least, not since the invention of the printing press.

When books were scarce the situation was different: the North African boy who later became known to history as St. Augustine spent countless hours of his education poring over, analyzing word-by-word, and memorizing a handful of books,

Erasmus, walking home on a foul night, glimpsed a tiny fragment of print in the mire. He bent down, seized upon it and lifted it to a flickering light with a cry of thankful joy. Here was a miracle.”