The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

Read what gives you delight—at least most of the time—and do so without shame.

“The tale of reading,” Dehaene writes, “begins when the retina receives photons reflected off the written page. But the retina is not a homogeneous sensor. Only its central part, called the fovea, is dense in high-resolution cells sensitive to incoming light, while the rest of the retina has a coarser resolution. The fovea, which occupies about 15 degrees of the visual field, is the only part of the retina that is genuinely useful for reading.”

In its lower-case version, whim is thoughtless, directionless preference that almost invariably leads to boredom or frustration or both. But Whim is something very different: it can guide us because it is based in self-knowledge—it can become for us a gracious Swiss pedagogue of the mind.

That is the best of all results when one is swimming up the literary stream—to find writers and works you love even more than the ones that prompted your adventure—but it is also, I must admit, one of the rarer ones.

But one of the wonderful things about books is that they don’t grow agitated or dismissive.

They patiently bear all the scrutiny you choose to give them, and the more carefully you read them the more of their secrets they yield.

At this point some may be muttering that this is all well and good, but writing such comments is enormously time-consuming. It slows you down. It allows you to read fewer books. To those complaints I reply, Yes. It is, it does, and it does. And those are good things.

Reading is supposed to be about the encounter with other minds, not an opportunity to return to the endlessly appealing subject of Me. Americans have enough encouragements to narcissism; let’s try to do without this one.

I don’t think that e-readers are going to be a cure-all for everyone in need of cultivating better and longer attention. But I do think that my experience suggests that it’s not reasonable to think of “technology”—in the usual vaguely pejorative meaning of that word—as the enemy of reading. The codex is itself a technology, and a supremely sophisticated one, but even digital electronic technologies vary tremendously: e-readers are by any measure far less distracting than an iPad or a laptop. It’s at least possible for new technologies to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem.

But in any event, Schwartz is absolutely right to say that “what reading teaches, first and foremost, is how to sit still for long periods and confront time head-on. The dynamism is all inside, an exalted, spiritual exercise so utterly engaging that we forget time and mortality along with all of life’s lesser woes, and simply bask in the everlasting present.”

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.

Poetry, lyric poetry anyway, is perhaps the ideal literary form for our time, as long as we rid ourselves of the notion that poems can be made sense

of in a single reading.

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.

All books want our attention, but not all of them want the same kind of attention, and good readers know this and make the necessary adjustments.

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.” This is usually taken as a wise or sententious general comment about the worthiness of various texts, but Ann Blair shows that Bacon was making a very practical recommendation to people who were overwhelmed by the availability of books and couldn’t imagine how they were going to read them all.

Bacon’s famous sentence is really a strategy for filtering.