The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

People who have had this kind of experience will want to have it again and again; and for some of us it happens most powerfully through the written word. Such imaginative engagement can only come through the written word when the reader possesses, or is possessed by, deep solitude—whether that solitude is given by circumstance or created, even in the midst of a crowd, by force of will sharpened by habit. The video game presses itself upon your attention, it constantly confronts you with stimuli to which some response is required; but books do not work that way. As Olaudah Equiano discovered, when you put your ear to the book it remains silent. You have to continue to throw yourself into it. This is something easy to learn: children are quite good at it, as Elizabeth Bowen notes: “At any age, the reader must come across: the child reader is the most eager and quick to do so; he not only lends to the story, he flings into the story the whole of his sensuous experience which from being limited is the more intense.” But what is easy to learn may be hard to sustain. Pascal in his Pensées notes that “the error of Stoicism” is to believe you can do always what you can do sometimes. “The reader must come across”—this is the key, this is why the reader can’t do without solitude and concentration. The effort has manifold rewards, but effort is required. It is lessened by habit, but never eliminated; and attentiveness remains always an achievement, one that cannot be taken for granted.