The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

For us to “ruminate” is to engage in a pretty dignified, or dignified-sounding, act, but Hugh was thinking of cows and goats and sheep, ruminant animals, those who chew the cud. A ruminant beast has multiple stomachs, the first of which, the rumen, can be used for temporary storage: the animal chews some food and swallows it, sending it to the rumen, but then regurgitates the partially digested lump and chews on it some more. Only after rumination does the food get passed to the next stomach, from which there is no return. Hugh believes this is the perfect model of attentive reading: to read the text, to pass it along to the depths of the mind—but then to call it back for further thought. (Hugh’s model of reading is notably and consistently physical: he wants to train our bodies to be our assistants in reading, surely because he knows what John Self learned, that bodies have a natural propensity to interfere with still and quiet attentiveness. To “incorporate” is literally to take into the body.) If you have ever read a passage and only later realized that you may not have understood it, and have therefore returned to reread it, you are a ruminant reader. However, as we have seen, powerful cultural and psychological forces inhibit any ruminant instincts we might have. If we are easily distracted, or in a hurry, or if we are wanting to get a book read so we can cross it off our list and move on to the conveyor belt’s next item, we may forget about that passage and never reg...