Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

by Maryanne Wolf

Like insight, the perception of beauty, whether in reading or in art, emerges out of many of the same capacities that compose deep reading. And, like insight, only the time we give to those capacities allows our perception of beauty to “father forth”42 long enough for us to see, recognize, and understand more. For just as reading is not solely visual, beauty is not simply about the senses. In her essay “Decline,” Marilynne Robinson wrote that beauty among other important things is a “strategy of emphasis.43 If it is not recognized, the text is not understood.” Beauty helps us attend to what is most important. If our perception of beauty becomes reduced to skimming like a water strider across the thin surface of words, we will miss the depths below; we will never be led by beauty to learn and understand what lies beneath.