The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

What’s frivolous is not the masterpiece itself, but the idea that at any given time I the reader am prepared to meet its standards, to rise to its challenges.

Alone in my room, congested and exhausted, I forgot my obsession with self-advancement. I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.

[I]t is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realises how absolutely modern the best of the old things are.

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.

Wallace again: “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.” Replace “think” with “read” and the point is clear.

“the man who moves along step by step is the man who moves along best, not like some who fall head over heels when they wish to make a great leap ahead.”

Pascal in his Pensées notes that “the error of Stoicism” is to believe you can do always what you can do sometimes.

Fortuity happens, but serendipity can be cultivated. You can grow in serendipity.

“in books I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace.