The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

by Alan Jacobs

Bruce R. Smith’s extraordinary study The Acoustic World of Early Modern England gives us a full and rather disorienting sense of just how cacophonous the world was for many of our ancestors half-a-millennium ago. And Diana Webb in her book Privacy and Solitude in the Middle Ages argues, convincingly, 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. Maybe they just wanted to find a place where they could be left alone to read.

Critical reflection of some kind is inevitable, so it would behoove us to do it well. The best guide I know to readerly judgment is our old friend Auden, who graciously summed up a lifetime of thinking about these matters in a single incisive sentence: “For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don’t like it; I can see this is good, and, though at present I don’t like it, I believe with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don’t like it.”