The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

we readers must learn to build our own “cone of silence”; the world won’t do it for us.

but this much is clear: the more noise surrounds us, the harder it is to read aloud.

that many people, men and women alike, sought monastic life less from piety than from a desperate need to find refuge from all the racket.

“The tragedy of all this is that the ‘chatter’ that Burnham wants to bring into our libraries is already available in coffee shops and in many bookshops.”

Denying these children the space and silence to study and contemplate the past that the better-off may be able to find in a spare room of their house is nothing short of social discrimination at its worst.”

Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing.

Bloom largely agrees with, “is that the pleasures of the imagination exist because they hijack mental systems that have evolved for real-world pleasure. We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don’t distinguish them from real ones.”

“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.

Why are we even taken by the whim to read? 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.

imaginative engagement can only come through the written word when the reader possesses, or is possessed by, deep solitude—

“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.

I do not believe I underwent any significant mental changes either. All I can say is: for a long time I didn’t get it, and then I got it. Such is the mystery of rereading, and few topics are more important for anyone who wants to make sense, and make value, of reading.

All of this suggests that rereading can be a product not of simple dissatisfaction, nor of the fan’s utter enchantment, but rather of some curious mix of gratification and a feeling of incompletion.

But note that Auden does not include this option: “I can see that this is trash, and, though at present I like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to dislike it.”

David Foster Wallace once said that “the point of books [is] to combat loneliness.” Reading is a way of connecting with others, but the connection is an odd combination of the intimate and the virtual: if we say that when Machiavelli entered his study there was really no one there, we speak a half-truth. In a way he sat there alone; in another way he enjoyed the best of company.

When I hear from nostalgic former students of mine, what they tend to miss most about

their college literature classes is the regular opportunity to talk about books, books that a group of people are all reading at the same time.

those who are not satisfied by book groups tend to give two reasons. The minor one is that the books chosen are rarely challenging enough to provide first-rate conversation. The major one is that too few participants in book groups are interested in really exploring the books: rather, for them, books seem to be an excuse for talking about other matters that they’re more deeply interested in, often their own emotional lives. It seems to me that these two complaints may well be related. Just as a purely entertaining work does not require annotation—

does not bear annotation—it probably requires little conversation as well. On the other hand, Finnegans Wake will not draw a big book-group crowd. The more I think about this, the more I realize how difficult a task book-group leaders, including Oprah Winfrey, have: the book has to be substantive enough to give people something to talk about, but not so difficult that people can’t persevere to the end, or that they feel inadequate to the conversation.

And if the book is either too simple or too challenging, the most natural thing to do is to fall back on one’s response to it—on one’s own feelings. (Apparent emotivism in this case being a token not of narcissism but of a need to keep a conversation goin...

But let’s imagine a Platonically perfect book group, one that would meet every need of the former literature majors who sometimes write to me with longing for the good old days of college. What would characterize such a group? First and most important, people committed both to careful reading and serious conversation; second, books with sufficient complexity and thoughtfulness to generate significant debate, whether about the works’ own structures and procedures or about the issues they raise. Given such circumstances, the solitary act of reading and the communal act of conversing

could merge into a single and beautiful entity. Each participant would bring the fruits of his or her private attention to the public table; judgments and interpretations would be tested there, found wanting or found wise, related to the judgments of others. Agreements could be reached, tensions identified—tensions in the group but perhaps also in the texts—and fundamental disagreements could be acknowledged with mutual charity. The difficulty is to find, in any given place, people who are willing and able to pursue such a noble endeavor,

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So whether you’re participating in an online conversation or reading a book by yourself, your experience is a readerly one and a responsive one. The most significant difference is that reading a book is dialogically asymmetrical: you learn about the book, about its characters and perhaps its author, but none of them learns anything about you.

These accompaniments change the reading experience in multiple ways: they can force us to reevaluate what we have read, and they can alter our orientation to a text when we go back into our cone of silence. Encounters with other readers can be a vital source of improvements in our judgments, particularly, I think, in teaching us not to be too quickly dismissive: