On Reading

On Reading

I am going to tackle a question that has baffled our finest minds: why reading is so pleasurable. Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, your uncle Tony—all these have ignored, or avoided, the question. Too hard, I guess. But this leaves us with a rich field for startling discovery—who will be the first to unlock the secret of reading enjoyment? Food, sex, television—these are not difficult to understand: but reading! Why would anyone want to spend hours, days, years, lifetimes with their sore eyes pointed at little black squiggles? Logan Pearsall Smith once remarked, “People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading”. We can all sympathize with that sentiment, but why do we like reading so much? As soon as I discovered reading, I couldn’t not do it—I did it for hours on end. It was just so enjoyable! Who would want to go out and live when you could stay at home and read? Surely, this is a puzzle of the highest moment—why reading is so deeply pleasurable. It is hard to believe that it is such a recent human invention—how did people pass the time when there was no reading to be done? How many people do you know who can read but choose not to? They may read junk, but they read: they sit there cradling a text of some sort, happy as a toad in the sun (beach reading is a favorite pastime). If it didn’t make our eyes so tired, would we ever stop?

Reading isn’t like looking at pictures: pictures are nice to look at; the eye revels in them (the colors, the shapes). We are not going to find the secret to reading hedonism in the marks that constitute a text—no one would willingly stare at those for hours unless they meant something. If you can’t read, you take no pleasure in gazing at writing. Is it some kind of sublimation or substitution, as if text and sex are somehow connected? Doubtful: writing per se is not like pornography or a Picasso nude. It’s just not sexy. Nor is it anything like a good meal: you don’t put the book in your mouth and chew on it; it doesn’t fill your belly. The sensation of reading is nothing like sexual or gustatory sensation; it’s hardly a sensation at all. We do better to think of the Vulcan mind-meld: the joining of two separate minds into a new unity. This suggestion is agreeably banal: in reading, your mind is connected to the mind of the author—you eavesdrop on his or her thoughts and feelings. We speak of mind-reading, and reading is a type of mind-reading. But this idea needs some refinement, because there are other ways of gaining access to the mind of the other—talking to them, watching how they behave, checking out their brain activity. Why is reading so connecting? Why, in particular, is looking better than listening? No doubt it is partly due to the fact that vision is our best sense: we love to look. Thus, in reading, we get to look into someone else’s mind, instead of hearing what he or she has to say. We can go at our own pace, directing our eyes as we see fit, instead of trying to keep up with someone’s speech. But it’s not just looking that appeals; it’s what we are looking at—those magic squiggles. For, in truth, we look throughthose squiggles not at them; they disappear from our field of view (we usually have no recollection of font type or print size). Thus, we have the illusion (or is it veridical?) of seeing another mind in action, not just inferring it from proxy stimuli. It is the very attenuation of print that fosters this impression; it doesn’t leap out at us, demanding our attention. We have sterility of the stimulus: thin and colorless as it is, it allows us to bypass it—while the other’s mind stands before our inner eye. We imagine that mind on the basis of the humble and vanishing marks inscribed on the page; we don’t have to contend visually with another’s body, standing there like a block of marble or meat. We experience non-bodily other-mind access, where the medium does not get in the way of the message. The author’s thought is right there, hovering before the mind, just as it is, or approximating to this state. The body has been sidelined, bracketed.

This connects with the loneliness question. Books, notoriously, are felt as a relief from loneliness. Books are our friends (that’s exactly how I used to feel about Dr Doolittle books). You don’t have to go out, knock on somebody’s door, and ask them if they want to come out and play; you just stay put and open up a book. Suddenly, you are no longer alone but in the presence of another conscious soul (maybe long dead). Hello! You know you will have a good time together, snugly ensconced by the fire. Many a child (adult too) has had little social contact aside from books—properly, their authors. So, our love of reading has everything to do with social interaction (Vulcan mind-melds), but mediated in a particular way. The book is our ideal friend, there for the opening, never failing to turn up. Immediately we are looking into the author’s mind, as if by magic. But there is another aspect to this mind-mind nexus: not only do we become acquainted with the author’s mind; we come to know our own mind too. The book works on the reader’s mind, activating it, stimulating it, so that his own mind heaves into view. The author has carefully arranged his words so that they can find their way into the reader’s mind, and as they do so they elicit whatever is already in that mind. Two minds are thus present together in the reader’s consciousness: the author’s mind and the reader’s mind. Self-knowledge is the result, as well as knowledge of other things. Reading is self-exploration (the kind Logan Pearsall Smith evidently preferred). Reading is like getting on a train and taking a leisurely trip through the countryside of your mind, accompanied by the author, but without needing to get on an actual train. Where your mind ends and the author’s mind begins may not be clear; a strange kind of merging takes place. In the reading mind-meld, mental borders are blurred.

Let’s try to say something profound—it’s worth a try anyway. Life is about movement, going from A to B. Movement is pleasurable—it had better be, because there is going to be a lot of it. But movement has its downside: it is fatiguing, potentially dangerous, and often boring. It would be nice to move without moving. Here is where reading comes in: it is motionless movement. In reading, we go on trips that don’t require us to travel through physical space. We get the pleasure without the pain. Reading is a lazy activity—little muscular energy is expended. But it is also an activity. We experience the pleasure of activity without its costs. Our eyes take a trip down the page, shifting smoothly from left to right, but our limbs are out of action–while our mind wanders far and wide. This is pleasurable. The reader is a lazy hedonist—no need to hunt for food or seek out mates or even walk down the street. There is pleasure to be had just by sitting still and moving your eyes a bit. What’s not to like? This is fortunate for the cause of literacy: imagine if reading were as strenuous as cross-country running or as difficult as calculus. You wouldn’t get many readers; people would prefer illiteracy. But luckily, reading is pleasurable, convenient, and relatively cheap. There is not much about it that rankles or harms. Reading is the healthiest of hedonisms.[1]

[1] Reading definitely discourages me from traveling. If I didn’t have reading, I would travel more. But reading takes the place of traveling: I can go to places without going to places. Places have their problems, and going to them is strewn with obstacles. The reading trip, however, is stress-free and inexpensive—plus I can sleep in my own bed. The travel book is really the epitome of what reading is all about: the pleasures of travel without the pains. Some people like the literal travel book (Sights and Sounds of Beirut), while some prefer the intellectual travel book—as it might be, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Nabokov’s very readable Lolita is a travel book in so many senses—geographical, moral, sensory, intellectual, linguistic, comical, artistic. It’s all about strange lands. Travel, they say, broadens the mind; but reading breaks its bonds. In reading, we encounter the truly foreign.