The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

Reading as if for life—how does this happen? At this point I cannot stress too much that I do not raise the spirit of David Copperfield as a means of denouncing the research of Wolf and Dehaene, as a means of celebrating the angelic Humanities at the expense of that beast Science. Such a move would be cheap, silly, and wrong. Rather, I simply want to emphasize that, having better understood the near-miracle of our ability to decode marks on paper, we are left with a truth equally remarkable: that some of us greatly desire to do so, and that some of us find abiding consolation in what we encounter when our eyes scan words on the page in those strange jerky saccades. That images striking the retina can be transferred to the edge of the left occipito-temporal fissure, and there can be decoded, is extraordinary; that what is decoded there can bring tears to the eyes, or cause laughter to rise up from the diaphragm, or bring to a deeply unhappy boy cut off from his beloved mother a few hours, or many hours, of joy … I don’t have words to express how deeply strange this is. I encouraged you in my previous section to “read at whim!”—but why would anyone ever be struck by that particular whim? This is a mystery.