The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

Instead of filling in the blanks, I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.

“A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

those who want no response at all are unlikely to publish a book;

All writing depends on the generosity of the reader.”

The reading of borrowed books can be powerful, but suffers from distinct limitations.

But your own notes—that’s a different story. They are an invaluable record of your encounter with another mind; they mark your excitements, your confusions, your moments of surprise or anger or delight. They fix a history of meaningful experience that would otherwise unmoor itself from memory’s dock.

Reading is supposed to be about the encounter with other minds, not an opportunity to return to the endlessly appealing subject of Me.

“We on Camiroi are only a little more intelligent than you on Earth,” one of the adults says. “We cannot afford to waste time on forgetting or reviewing, or pursuing anything of a shallowness that lends itself to scanning.”*

major transformations in the life of the Roman empire happened slowly, gradually, and without anyone noticing them: people were insensible to the changes, and by the time anyone figured out what had happened, it was too late for a reversal of course. And this insensibility affects political structures, social and religious developments, military cultures, and the hearts of emperors alike;

I found my ability to concentrate, and concentrate for long periods of time, restored almost instantly.

We all already know what we need to do if we want to get back to reading slowly and attentively. Shut down the computer; put aside the cellphone.

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. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

“attention enables you to have the kind of Dionysian experience beautifully described by the old-fashioned term ‘rapt’—completely absorbed, engrossed, fascinated, perhaps even ‘carried away’—that underlies life’s deepest pleasures, from the scholar’s study to the carpenter’s craft to the lover’s obsession.”

And only those who have experienced that complete absorption of the self in something else, something beautiful, know also what it means to have misplaced that capacity; only we know the anxiety that arises from the fear we may never have that again.

This is why attentiveness is worth cultivating: not just because it is good for you or because (as Gallagher also says) it can help you “organize your world,” but because such raptness is deeply satisfying.

the reason for our raptness is sheer and unmotivated delight.

The book you read—or whatever you read—becomes your ally and your chief support as you take ownership of your inner space and banish those forces that would rule your consciousness.

But really, the cultivation of attentiveness has always been hard for human beings: as long as we have had readers we have had readers frustrated by their inability to concentrate. It is the nature of the human beast.

“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.”

the common medieval belief that human life is a pilgrimage, and each human person is a viator, a wayfarer: wayfarers know where they are going, and remain in motion, but also know that they haven’t arrived.

Hugh particularly insists that the student of reading cultivate the virtue of humility:

“For the reader there are three lessons taught by humility that are particularly important: First, that he hold no knowledge or writing whatsoever in contempt. Second, that he not blush to learn from any man. Third, that when he has attained learning himself, he not look down upon anyone else.”

Chew the textual cud for a while before sending it to the further stomachs of your mind: you may well spare yourself a case of heartburn later.

Serious “deep attention” reading has always been and will always be a minority pursuit,

One of the most widely quoted sentences of Sir Francis Bacon—it comes from his essay “Of Studies”—concerns the reading of books: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

we suffer not from “information overload” but from “filter failure.” Bacon’s famous sentence is really a strategy for filtering.

All this to say that the idea that many teachers hold today that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading—or at least to appreciate and enjoy whole books—is largely alien to the history of education.

the only true education is self-education,

The writer Stefan Zweig once defined a book as a ‘handful of silence that assuages torment and unrest.’

silence was a diminishing natural resource.

I was not blind to the faults of his writing, but the faults no longer blinded me to the virtues.

Many of us form profound attachments when we read. Sometimes we attach ourselves to characters, imagining them as our friends or lovers or most profound enemies;

One of the most ambitious and promising endeavors in this field is CommentPress, a project of the Institute for the Future of the Book.

for many children the act of being read to—and therefore the book itself—is powerfully associated with being loved.

“Twice in your life you know you are approved of by everyone—when you learn to walk and when you learn to read.”

About seven hundred years ago Richard de Bury—an English monk, librarian, book collector, and eventually Bishop of Durham—wrote that “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. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates; all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.”

For the first time in over a quarter-century, our survey shows that literary reading has risen among adult Americans.