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July 19, 2020
The act of taking on the perspective and feelings of others is one of the most profound, insufficiently heralded contributions of the deep-reading processes.
Proust’s description of “that fertile miracle of communication effected in solitude” depicts an intimate emotional dimension within the reading experience: the capacity to communicate and to feel with another without moving an inch out of our private worlds.
Drama makes more visible what each of us does when we pass over in our deepest, most immersive forms of reading. We welcome the Other as a guest within ourselves, and sometimes we become Other. For a moment in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally. And sometimes, as this remarkable young woman’s example shows us, we experience what life has not allowed us. It is an incalculable gift.
And there is a gift within a gift. Perspective taking not only connects our sense of empathy with what we have just read but also expands our internalized knowledge of the world.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice.
As expressed in the play Shadowlands, about the life of C. S. Lewis, “We read to know that we are not alone.”18
Niccolò Machiavelli. In order that he might better enter the consciousness and “converse” with the authors he was reading, he would dress formally in the style of dress appropriate to the authors in their various epochs. In a letter to the diplomat Francesco Vettori in 1513, he wrote: I am not ashamed to speak with them,19 and to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; four hours may pass and I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; I give myself entirely to them.
In Christ Actually, he used the life and thought of the early-twentieth-century German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer26 to underscore the life-and-death consequences of human failure to take on the perspective of other.
The unsettling reality, however, is that unbeknownst to many of us, including until recently myself, there has begun an unanticipated decline of empathy among our young people.
Sara Konrath and her research group at Stanford University that showed a 40 percent decline in empathy in our young people over the last two decades, with the most precipitous decline in the last ten years. Turkle attributes the loss of empathy29 largely to their inability to navigate the online world without losing track of their real-time, face-to-face relationships. In her view our technologies place us at a remove, which changes not only who we are as individuals but also who we are with one another.
Reading at the deepest levels may provide one part of the antidote to the noted trend away from empathy. But make no mistake: empathy is not solely about being compassionate toward others; its importance goes further. For it is also about a more in-depth understanding of the Other, an essential skill in a world of increasing connectedness among divergent cultures.
Often undeveloped in many individuals on the autism spectrum and lost in a pathological condition called alexithymia, theory of mind refers to an essential human capacity that allows us to perceive, analyze, and interpret the thoughts and feelings of others in our social interactions with them.
These studies are the beginning of increasing work on the place of empathy and perspective taking in the neuroscience of literature. The cognitive scientist Keith Oatley,34 who studies the psychology of fiction, has demonstrated a strong relationship between reading fiction and the involvement of the cognitive processes known to underlie both empathy and theory of mind.
Oatley and his York University colleague Raymond Mar suggest that the process of taking on another’s consciousness in reading fiction and the nature of fiction’s content—where the great emotions and conflicts of life are regularly played out—not only contribute to our empathy, but represent what the social scientist Frank Hakemulder called our “moral laboratory.”35
The reading circuitry is elaborated by such simulations; so also our daily lives, and so also the lives of those who would lead others.
The novelist Jane Smiley worries that it is just this dimension in fiction that is most threatened by our culture: “My guess is that mere technology will not kill36 the novel. . . . But novels can be sidelined. . . . When that happens, our society will be brutalized and coarsened by people . . . who have no way of understanding us or each other.”
Empathy involves, therefore, both knowledge and feeling. It involves leaving past assumptions behind and deepening our intellectual understanding of another person, another religion, another culture and epoch. In this moment in our collective history, the capacity for compassionate knowledge of others may be our best antidote to the “culture of indifference”
Who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria37 of experiences, information, books we have read. . . . Each life is an encyclopedia, a library. —Italo Calvino
A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel exemplifies this essential component of deep reading when he writes that reading is cumulative.38
Manguel learned in Borges’s personal library permeates every book he would go on to write, from A Reader on Reading to The Library at Night: that is, the profound impact of books upon the lives and knowledge stores of those who read them.
read. Does the content of what we are reading in our present milieu provide us sufficient background knowledge both for the particular demands of life in the twenty-first century and for the formation of the deep-reading brain circuit? We seem to be moving as a society from a group of expert readers with uniquely personal, internal platforms of background knowledge to a group of expert readers who are increasingly dependent on similar, external servers of knowledge. I want to understand the consequences and costs of losing these uniquely formed internal sources of knowledge without losing
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If the brilliant futurist Ray Kurzweil39 is correct, it may be possible to have all those external sources of information and knowledge implanted within the human brain, but at present this is technologically, physiologically, and ethically not an option.
An answer to such scenarios is before our eyes: in the reciprocal relationship between background knowledge and deep reading. When you read carefully, you are more able to discern what is true and to add to it what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson described this aspect of reading in his extraordinary speech “The American Scholar”:
Keith Stanovich suggested something similar some time ago about the development of word knowledge. In childhood, he declared, the word-rich get richer and the word-poor get poorer, a phenomenon he called the “Matthew Effect”41 after a passage in the New Testament. There is also a Matthew-Emerson Effect for background knowledge: those who have read widely and well will have many resources to apply to what they read; those who do not will have less to bring, which, in turn, gives them less basis for inference, deduction, and analogical thought and makes them ripe for falling prey to
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How we analyze and use this information and whether we cease to deploy the time-consuming, critical processes to evaluate new information will significantly impact our future. Absent the checks and balances provided by both our prior knowledge content and our analytical processes, we run the risk of digesting information without questioning whether the quality or prioritization of the information available to us is accurate and free from external motivations and prejudices.42
Eileen Gunn. Her six words, ostensibly about space travel, may require a few extra STEM46 cells . . . Computer, did we bring batteries? Computer . . . 47
Without concepts there can be no thought,48 and without analogies there can be no concepts . . . analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking. —Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander
examines. The more we know, the more we can draw analogies, and the more we can use those analogies to infer, deduce, analyze, and evaluate our past assumptions—all of which increases and refines our growing internal platform of knowledge.
The converse is equally true, with harsh implications for our present and future society: the less we know, the fewer possibilities we have for drawing analogies, for increasing our inferential and analytical powers, and for expanding and applying our general knowledge.
Mark Edmundson’s laudable book Why Read?,
Edmundson articulates here two connected, insufficiently discussed threats to critical thinking. The first threat comes when any powerful framework for understanding our world (such as a political or religious view) becomes so impenetrable to change and so rigidly adhered to that it obfuscates any divergent type of thought, even when the latter is evidence-based or morally based.
The second threat that Edmundson observes is the total absence of any developed personal belief system in many of our young people, who either do not know enough about past systems of thought (e.g., contributions by Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, or Noam Chomsky) or who are too impatient to examine and learn from them.
Insight is the culmination of the multiple modes of exploration we have brought to bear on what we have read thus far: the information harvested from the text; the connections to our best thoughts and feelings; the critical conclusions gained; and then the uncharted leap into a cognitive space where we may upon occasion glimpse whole new thoughts.
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead61
one of the most loving functions of insight within deep reading: to leave our best thoughts for those who will follow.
Judith Shulevitz suggests in6 The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time
need to be instantly aware of every new stimulus, what some call our novelty bias.8
Hyperattention is one of the inevitable by-products of this confluence. The literary critic Katherine Hayles characterized hyperattention10 as a phenomenon caused by (and then adding to the need for) rapid task switching, high levels of stimulation, and a low-level threshold of boredom.11
As early as 1998, Linda Stone, then part of the Virtual Worlds Group at Microsoft, coined the term continuous partial attention12 to capture the way children attend to their digital devices and then to their environments. Since that time, these devices have multiplied in number and ubiquity, including for the very young.
Roger Bohn, is quoted as saying, “I think one thing is clear16: our attention is being chopped into shorter intervals and that is probably not good for thinking deeper thoughts.”
day. To be sure, there are many thoughtful readers (and writers) such as James Wood who are reassured by the fact that we are all reading more, not less.
After all, a little over a decade ago a report from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) raised a legitimate concern that many people were reading less than they had only a short time before, possibly due to the influence of digital reading. A few years later another report,17 initiated by the esteemed poet and then NEA director Dana Gioia, indicated that the trend had been reversed and that as a society we were reading more than ever, possibly spurred on by the same digitally based factor.
the last thing a society needs is what Socrates feared: young people thinking they know the truth before they ever begin the arduous practice of searching for it.
First, we simplify. Second, we process the information as rapidly as possible; more precisely, we read more in briefer bursts. Third, we triage. We stealthily begin the insidious trade-off between our need to know with our need to save and gain time. Sometimes we outsource our intelligence to the information outlets that offer the fastest, simplest, most digestible distillations of information we no longer want to think about ourselves.
