In a recent conversation, a friend asked me the difference between reading books and scrolling on a phone: “If you lament the bus riders with their eyes locked on their screens, might you not also bemoan the same absorption if everyone was reading books?” The question led me to ponder the qualitative difference between the two media. Whereas our devices are interactive, offering a million portals to information and entertainment that bedazzle the mind, books are singular in arrangement: they present no more than text on page, and thereby ask the reader to enter its domain on its terms. Our devices cater to our whims and facilitate –indeed, exacerbate– our impulse toward distraction, trivia, and gratification. Books, on the other hand, demand something of us: attention, patience, stillness, a willingness to ponder. Great books demand more from us than we are prepared to give. When we rise to its challenge, we expand our horizons and deepen our store of understanding. Books are portals to other times and places with expositions that edify and transform the reader. The hysteria of social media coarsen a world of intricacy and complexity, leaving us to choke on fumes of outrage. Books, however, offer a refreshing drink – but only if we are willing to enter the cool, dark well that is remote from the din of the world.
Books are from a slower time. Browsing a bookstore is entirely different from browsing the internet. To register an impression of a book, I must sample a few pages. In those first few moments, I sense the author’s voice, the timbre of language, the cadence of prose, the layout of the story. This introduction itself requires something of me by way of patience. To read a book is to exercise a faculty rarely used in modern life: commitment. Reading requires me to dedicate time and attention to an immersive task. I arrange for myself a quiet space and reserve uninterrupted hours to the pages. I suspend immediate concerns, the managerial mind preoccupied with multiple projects. Immersion in stillness, quiet accordance with words, and concourse with seminal ideas, instil the tenor of an inner life, which in turn nourishes reflection and understanding. Deep reading is never passive. The reader enters a landscape of someone else’ thoughts and traverse a varied terrain. I often find myself nodding in agreement, pausing to illustrate an author’s point, to refute a proposition, or to marvel at an insight. Having traversed the hinterlands of an author’s perspective, I emerge transformed. The world is not the same.
Many readers can point to titles that have been pivotal to their development. These are books that shift our view of ourselves and the world, and they mark the incremental shifts that accrue to transformation and growth. For me, the books are many: Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions revealed to me how our most trusted knowledge evolves over time. Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain instantiated a man’s journey from to hedonistic playboy to cloistered monk. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian unveiled a brutal violence that is indifferent to justice. Plato’s Republic, convinced me of the necessity of justice despite the chaos in the world. Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac revealed an ethic in which land is primary. David Henry Thoreau’s Walden conveyed the beauty of solitude in a world of bustle. These books illuminate in an instant what is otherwise only felt in the dark. Something lurks in obscurity, but its shape remains indiscernible. Books crystallize the murky and clarify the ambiguous. Suddenly, the world is less baffling, less intractable, and less imposing in the light of knowledge.
It’s their ability to remedy our benighted souls that make books such a valued technology. However, books nourish us not only with their content, but with the form through which they relay vital content. A frazzled mind cannot follow reams of text that stretch hundreds of pages. Deep reading requires silence and solitude, the very goods that a harried society ill-affords. For that very reason, reading is precious and rare, a delight enjoyed by those who dare to buck the trend. A quiet hour of reading is not a withdrawal, still less a form of negation; it is deep communion with the essence life, a conversation with wisdom distilled through ages of hard-earned reflection. The silence of reading strips our days to its core vitality. Absent the tasks and meetings, we are left with the words, the rustle of the page, the sound of our breathing. Without a book, our thoughts run amok. Reading brings order to the mind. We pause to reflect, or press further without delay. We can put down the book and return to it later, but the book remains its own course. In other words, the book is a train on track to its destination. Its singularity is its strength. It neither hosts distraction nor entertain infinite fancies. By committing to its singularity, we strengthen our focus and refine our ability to abide our own minds.
It is for this reason that I recommend reading to those who feel their minds an unbearable affliction. First, by slowing down, we are better able to catch our breaths. We discover that life is not about quantity but quality – not how many activities completed today, but how well a moment is savoured. Reading connects us with our interiority by providing a means of working with our attention. When we follow the words on the page, our attention adheres to the logic of an argument or the arc of a story. Where there was mess and chaos, there is now coherence and continuity. These aspects of interiority are the very traits that many people struggle to experience. They feel oppressed by flurries of thought, or terrible storms of worry. Reading a compelling story is a way to shift a restless mind. We learn that a busy mind is not the death of us, that there are ways to direct our attention and sow order into our mentality. However, reading is more than a pleasant distraction; it is schooling for the mind so that we learn to abide silence while and deepening our inner dimensions. Books are an unfailing refuge for those battered by the tumult of their inner worlds.
Short-form texts cannot sufficiently capture the complexities of a multi-faceted world. Sensationalist tweets and sound-bytes provoke reactions that can be mistaken for thoughtful discourse, but they fall short of the qualified understanding afforded by patient study. Unbridled reaction is no substitute for careful deliberation. Yet, in a social media landscape where the number of “likes” and followers count as currency, provocation has become its own end. This manner of social engagement is odious because it conditions us to react, to fulminate as a matter of course. In this milieu, circumspection, skepticism, and critical analysis fade into obscurity. For example, although inflation imposes economic hardship, there is more to the inflationary phenomena than what can be easily stated in a tirade against the government or the central bank. One must be willing to learn about monetary institutions and the history of economic policy in order to arrive at a more comprehensive view of inflation as an economic phenomena. People need not become experts on a subject in order to think skillfully about it; they only need to undergo some extended learning in order to arrive at a more qualified perspective. Unlike the raw opinions that generate the fray of social media, books facilitate deeper thinking and more skillful understanding.
From the perspective of mental health, books cultivate a reflective capacity that helps us refine our conduct of life. Without a reflective inner life, in which we examine our actions and inclinations, we are doomed to our existing patterns. Books are a precious medium through which we converse with sages past and present, enter into dialogue with perennial ideas that lie at the core of human experience, and examine ourselves in light those who came before. In this communion, we discover ourselves part of a long lineage. Our questions unfurl from an inquiry that reaches back to antiquity. Our pondering unites us with others who also struggled with big questions, and there we find comfort and guidance. For those who fear death, Epicurius offers sage advice. For those who are weary of human endeavours, Marcus Aurelius proves a splendid companion. For those who mourn impermanence, Matsuo Basho has left us something sublime. All these guides have walked before us with an acuity of mind that render us feeble by comparison. They reach out to us across centuries; their words, a timeless benediction, guiding us toward our destiny.
We don’t have to walk alone. The guidance we seek is in those pages. Flip past the cover, turn the first page. The portal opens.