According to every available metric, the number of people who read books across almost every demographic in countries like Australia and the United States has fallen precipitously over the last fifteen years. Whether it be for enjoyment or edification, reading books is no longer something many of us choose to do. As Rose Horowitch writes in her recent cover story for The Atlantic, “The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most — retirees, women, and college graduates — have seen a collapse.”
This isn’t to say we don’t read. Indeed, the paradox is that this crisis of literacy comes at a time when we are inundated with words. The incessant production and circulation of texts constitute our cultural milieu, to the point that we could say these messages are our medium.
But isn’t there is a vast difference between merely looking at or reacting to or skimming words on a screen, and the kind of sustained attentiveness or self-forgetting patience that is demanded by the commitment to immerse oneself in a book? Just as there is a vast difference between expressing oneself in writing and supplying prompts to a chatbot. It is not merely that the activity is different; so too is the effect the activities have on our inner life.
When he was trying to make sense of the peculiar process involved in reading-with-understanding, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein put it this way: “When I read a poem or narrative with feeling [mit Empfindung], surely something goes on in me which does not go on when I merely skim the lines [die Zeilen … überfliege] for information.”
How are we to account for this difference? And how does it relate to the “something” that Wittgenstein refers to? The size of the text has something to do with it. Both Søren Kierkegaard in 1846 and Ray Bradbury in his 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, warned against the effect of the ever-increasing abbreviation of our modes of writing on our interior lives. Bradbury’s nefarious Captain Beatty thus anticipated the trajectory that would lead to the advent of social media with remarkable precision:
“Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending … Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column … One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”
But, as they say, size isn’t everything. Big books are not necessarily “good” or “serious” or “weighty” books, and there is an infinite distance between a well-wrought poem and a tweet. Rather, what seems to matter is the time that is involved, and the intensity or focus of the inner labour that the text demands. Which is to say, what matters is our exposure to the moral reality of another as it presents itself to us in that text.
This brings us to the other paradox of our moment. The proliferation of modes of communication and expressions of opinion has not brought about greater exposure to the moral reality of others. Through the speed, the superficiality and the algorithmic selectivity of our rapid-fire systems of hypercommunication, we have effectively walled ourselves off from the strange, the other. As the Korean-German philosopher Byung Chul Han has argued, the “digital web inhabited by the ego has lost all that is foreign … we operate in the numerical space of the Same”. He continues: “Literature and art are on the way to the Other. The desire for the Other is their essential trait.” But today, “the silent voice of the Other is drowned out by the noise of the Same. The literary crisis ultimately stems from the expulsion of the Other.”
In some religious traditions, there are habits that are instilled to prepare readers for encounter with the absolutely “Other” — which is to say, the sacred — in certain texts. By means of these habits, the ego is set aside, or rather, is put in its place, by means of the disciplining of time and the cultivation of what Simone Weil would call the “unmixed attention” she would equate with prayer. Such reading is meant to be a form of ecstasy, in the sense of being drawn outside of one’s self. Today, however, as Han writes, “the economy of attention”, oriented as it is to the fleeting satisfactions of the self, “overgrows both the poetics and the ethics of attentiveness”.
Is there a connection, then, between our prevailing condition of contempt for others, our habits of moral grandstanding and of antidemocratic impatience, and the decline in our willingness to read books? Ought we to begin thinking of the skills required to read well — “with feeling”, as Wittgenstein put it — as a kind of preparation for moral encounter with others?
Further reading:
Guest: Sophie Gee is Professor of English at Princeton University and the inaugural Vice-Chancellor Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Sydney. She is the co-host, with Jonty Claypole, of the Secret Life of Books podcast, and the author, most recently, of The Barbarous Feast: Eating and Writing in the Eighteenth-Century World.
You can listen to the first episode of the Secret Life of Books podcast series on George Eliot’s Middlemarch here.
