The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

But then there are the people Nicholas Carr interviewed, and Carr himself: people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it—who can’t get back, as Lucy Pevensie for a time can’t get back to Narnia: what was an opening to another world is now the flat planked back of a wardrobe. They’re the ones who need help, and want it, and are prepared to receive it. I had become one of those people myself, or was well on my way to it, when I was rescued through the novelty of reading on a Kindle. My hyper-attentive habits were alienating me further and further

But how can we concentrate, how can we cultivate or practice deep attention, how can we read with all this noise?

In Pursuit of Silence,

George Prochnik

So many [scholarship boys from poor families] learned the early habit of working with the wireless on and the family talking, of building a cone of silence around themselves.

YES!!!

We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones.”

recent research confirms that something extraordinary happens in our brains when we read stories. Nicholas Carr describes it in The Shallows: “Researchers used brain scans to examine what happens inside people’s heads as they read fiction. They found that ‘readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.’ … The brain regions that are activated ‘closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe

“We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones”—not that we can’t distinguish them, but that we don’t. Bloom points out that while very small children may be confused in these matters, well before the age of four they have it all scoped out pretty accurately: “Two-year-olds pretend to be animals and airplanes, and they can understand when other people do the same thing. A child sees her father roaring and prowling like a lion, and might run away, but she doesn’t act as though she thinks her father is actually a lion. If she believed that, she would be terrified.” And yet that two-year-old utters some pretty convincing screams, and her heart races; if it weren’t for the smile on her face we might think she really is frightened.

Coleridge was right when he wrote about that readerly necessity called the “willing suspension of disbelief”: we have to consent to the partial dissolution of the boundaries between the imagined and the real, and, I think, learn how to make that consent effectual. For some of us, it becomes deeply habitual, but the spell of reading is always in danger of being broken:

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.

Such is the mystery of rereading, and few topics are more

important for anyone who wants to make sense, and make value, of reading. If most of us read too fast, most of us also read too many books and are unwisely reluctant to return to something we think we already know. I use “think” there advisedly,

because as my examples show, a first encounter with a worthwhile book is never a complete encounter, and we are usually in error to make it a final one. But those who want to have read, who are checking books off their “bucket list,” will find the thought of rereading even more repulsive than the thought of reading slowly and ruminatively. And yet rereading a book can oft...

Ray Suarez interviewed Harold Bloom about Harry Potter in 2000: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/conversation/july-dec00/bloom_8–29.html. His comments on the only American writers that “deserve our praise” appeared in the Boston Globe on September 24, 2003: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2003/09/24/dumbing_down_ american_readers/. His How to Read and

New Republic on January 20, 2010: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/bring-back-dwight. The interview with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy that I quote appeared in the Guardian of London on April 24, 2010: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/apr/24/lcd-soundsystem-this-is-happening. Chesterton’s wonderful essay “In Defence of Penny Dreadfuls” (1901) may be found in dozens of places on the Internet. Auden’s comment on the “high holidays of the spirit” comes from his essay called simply “Reading,” in The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Random House, 1962). Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever (New York: Doubleday) came out in 2009. Cathleen Schine’s essay “I Was a Teenage Illiterate” appeared in the New York Times Book Review on February 26, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/books/review/Schine-t.html.

Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain (New York: Viking, 2009)

Alex Rose’s “at least they’re watching TV” line appeared on the blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book: http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/the_almighty_ word.html. Gibbon wrote his Autobiography in the last years

Geoff Nicholson’s story about his reading competition with his friend Rob appeared in the New York Times Book Review on February 19, 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/books/review/Nicholson-t.html.

W. S. Merwin’s “Why Some People Do Not Read Poetry” also appeared in the New York Review of Books, the print edition of April 30, 2009.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/07/why-abundance-is-good-a-reply-to-nick-carr/. Each entry in

Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise (New York: Doubleday, 2010) appeared on the Amazon.com page for the book.