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

by Maryanne Wolf

Deep reading is always about connection: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.

Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity: “Education for world citizenship needs to begin early.27 As soon as children engage in storytelling, they can tell stories about other lands and other peoples . . . [they can] learn . . . that religions other than Judaism and Christianity exist, that people have many traditions and ways of thinking. . . . As children explore stories, rhymes, and songs—especially in the company of the adults they love—they are led to notice the suffering of other living creatures with a new keenness.”

Whatever our age, we can be changed by the lives of others if we learn to connect the whole of the reading circuit with our moral imagination.

Every child should be given the opportunity to learn how to code.11 Coding is often seen as difficult or exclusive, but we see it as a new type of literacy—a skill that should be accessible for everyone. Coding helps learners to organize their thinking and express their ideas, just as writing does. As young children code . . . they learn how to create and express themselves with the computer, rather than just interact with software created by others. Children learn to think sequentially, explore cause and effect, and develop design and problem-solving skills. At the same time . . . they aren’t just learning to code, they are coding to learn.

Other tools for reading online would target more pragmatic problems such as the best uses of search engines; choosing the right search words to locate information; and, very important, learning how to evaluate information in searches, so as to see biases and attempts to influence opinion and/or consumption, and to recognize the potential for false, unsubstantiated information. Directly addressing the kind of decision-making, attention-monitoring, and executive skills that are necessary for good online reading and Internet habits is good for all learning, whatever a child’s learning style and on whatever medium children use. Within that context, discussing the good, the bad, the attractive, and the potentially harmful realities of Internet usage should become this culture’s version of the sex education courses of the past and a basic part of the training that accompanies every elementary school teacher’s toolbox.

In her beautiful essay “Time,” Eva Hoffman beseeches us to consider how “the need for reflection, for making sense of our transient condition, is time’s paradoxical gift to us, and possibly the best consolation.”

When asked what Buffett had taught him, Gates gently remarked that Buffett had taught him to “fill his calendar with spaces.” In a surprising gesture Buffett pulled out a small paper calendar, less than the size of his hand, and showed all the empty spaces, quietly saying “Time is the one thing no one can buy.” No one spoke for a second and the camera did not move from that avuncular face, as if to preserve in film that simplest but most difficult-to-sustain insight.

I regard its gradual loss more as an outcome of our milieu’s unforeseen sequelae—the constant need for efficiency: “buying time” without knowing for what purpose; decreasing attention spans, pushed beyond their cognitive limits by a flotsam of distractions and information that will never become knowledge; and the increasingly manipulated and superficial uses of knowledge that will never become wisdom.

In the first half of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot wrote in “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?11 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” In the first quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom—with the resulting diminution of all three.

the Latin expression festina lente, which translates as “hurry slowly” or “hurry up slowly,” to underscore the writer’s need to slow time. I use it here to help you experience the third life more consciously: knowing how to quiet the eye and allow your thoughts to settle and be still, poised for what will follow.

lente gives you a release from the reduced ways most of us now read: fast if you can, slowly if you must. To possess cognitive patience is to recover a rhythm of time that allows you to attend with consciousness and intention. You read quickly (festina), till you are conscious (lente) of the thoughts to comprehend, the beauty to appreciate, the questions to remember, and, when fortunate, the insights to unfold.

To you who like Mrs. Ramsay know the place we enter when we leave the surface of our self behind and are released from time, there is a suspended joy with little parallel. Such joy is no random event reached by serendipity or a temperament disposed to happiness; rather, it is the perquisite of the hard-won thoughts and feelings of the person who makes room and time for it.

My hope for my children and my children’s children and yours is that they, like Bonhoeffer, will know where to find the many forms of joy that reside in the secret holding places in the reading life and the sanctuary it gives each of us who seeks it.

It would be catastrophic to become a nation22 of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others. And yet, unless we support these endeavors, it is in such a nation that we may well live. It is therefore very urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship.

The good readers of a society are both its canaries—which detect the presence of danger to its members—and its guardians of our common humanity. The final perquisite of the third reading life is the ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom.

Wisdom, I conclude, is not contemplation alone,28 not action alone, but contemplation in action. —John Dunne

Of all the gifts that the third life of the good reader bestows, wisdom, the highest form of cognition, is its ultimate expression.

So also the experience in the third life of the good reader: to be continuously engaged in trying to reach and express our best thoughts so as to expand an ever truer, more beautiful understanding of the universe and to lead lives based on this vision. To embark on such a quest is the furthest goal of deep reading and the beginning of wisdom, but not its end.

Just as Proust articulated years ago, “the end of [the author’s] wisdom31 is but the beginning of ours.” For some years now, these words have been my aide-mémoire for knowing when to stop and prepare the good reader—you, my dear reader—to take over the work that lies ahead of us all.

Festina lente, dear and good reader. Come home.