Serious reading: how to read with attention and insight

Reclaiming the deepest of deep reading

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Gaston Bachelard, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire

It’s easy to despair. The Sturm and Drang surrounding the parlous state reading feels oppressively omnipresent and inescapably pervasive. We’re surrounded by doomsayers proclaiming the seemingly inevitable decline of serious reading and its increasing lack of relevance in the rut of modernity we’ve dug out for ourselves. This decline, brought about by smart phones, social media and GenAI, is part of what Jon Haidt has called “The Great Rewiring.” (If you have to read one article along these lines, and I think you should, perhaps the most beautifully written is Carl Hendrick’s part paean, part dirge, Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us.)

A popular line of argument suggests that if reading is an activity for which evolution cannot have intended us then, the logic follows, it must be an unnatural activity. And, if reading is somehow unnatural then the inability to read - and the lack of interest in doing so - must therefore be more natural. My view is that while we certainly haven’t had time to evolve an innate capacity for reading, it’s no more unnatural than wearing pants, eating cheese or living in houses.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates expresses a deep ambivalence about the value of reading. He recounts the myth of the ‘curse of Thoth’ (or Theuth) who presents writing as a gift to humanity. However, the wise King Thamus warns that writing will weaken memory and give only the appearance of wisdom, not true understanding.¹

Socrates echoes this view, arguing that written texts cannot respond to questions or explain themselves; they are static and lifeless compared to the cut and thrust of dialectical conversation. For Socrates, reading is too passive; genuine knowledge comes from active dialogue and critical questioning. While he acknowledges the written word has some practical value, he ultimately views it as a lesser, even dangerous, form of communication compared to the living, dynamic process of spoken inquiry.

This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

And he was right. Reading rots the brain. Outsourcing our memories to the page has had a catastrophic effect on our ability to hold complex ideas in memory. After all, we no longer need to. But Socrates’ take on reading was a pale, utilitarian vision of what can be a completely absorbing, almost addictive activity. What I’m concerned with here is the notion of ‘serious reading.” Frank Furedi describes reading in this way as an immersive, reflective engagement with texts which allows individuals to reimagine our circumstances, test out our personalities and ideas, and continually develop our sense of who we are. In his view, “reading – especially serious reading – is itself a culturally beneficial activity.”²

What enriches an individual has the capacity to enrich us all. What Socrates maybe didn’t anticipate was the effect of literature on our minds beyond the quotidian. As Emily Dickinson put it,

There is no Frigate like a Book 
To take us Lands away 
Nor any Coursers like a 
Page Of prancing Poetry – 

Or, as the 14th century Buddhist mock, Yoshida Kenkō wrote, “To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you, and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations, such is a pleasure beyond compare.”³

Reading can be - still is - transformative. The trade off between the risks Socrates sets out and the pay offs sketched out by Dickinson and Kenkō - the ability to commune, mind to mind, with countless generations in different times and places - is as close to magic as most of us will experience. And this is now under threat.

Instead of simply bemoaning the fact that our minds may be in the process of being rewired, I want here to offer some small solution, an antidote to despair, a last ditch attempt to hold the line, even if only a line in my own mind.

If our experience of reading is to proceed beyond the most superficial, we need some ownership of facility with the tools with which meaning is made. What these tools might be is captured elegantly by the philosopher, Michael Oakeshott who advocated for

… languages recognized, not as the means of contemporary communication but as investments in thought and records of perceptions and analogical understandings; literatures recognized as the contemplative exploration of beliefs, emotions, human characters and relationships in imagined situations, liberated from the confused, cliché ridden, generalized conditions of commonplace life and constituting a world of ideal human expressions inviting neither approval nor disapproval but the exact attention and understanding of those who read …

The Voice of Liberal Learning p. 23.

This vision of reading as requiring ‘exact attention’ and ‘analogical understandings’ offers a path through the thicket of instrumentalism that blights what serious reading has become. By exploring language as a ‘record of perception’ and an ‘investment in thought,’ and in contemplating literature as the imagined story of humanity in all its aspects, we can begin to amass the implements required to hew meaning from the edifice of words with which we are confronted. Reading literary texts requires that we pay attention in particular, specialised ways and, once we have learned to focus, to be able to experience new insights through seeing that what we are attending to has connections to things we have experienced previously.

How to notice

By ‘noticing’ I mean reading (and writing) whilst being attuned to the choices and effects of everything that language has to offer: punctuation, sounds, diction, syntax, patterns of form, imagery and the ways each of these combines to make narratives and arguments. If we read or write without awareness of the effects of language we are doing so naïvely. If we’re not noticing, we’re likely to see the writer’s choices as merely coincidental and view our own efforts at writing as the product of happy, or unhappy, chance. But if we notice as we read and write then we’re alive to possibilities, able to make informed choices and consider multiple interpretations.

Our ability to pay attention is strictly limited. We can see metaphor alive in the phrasing: attention is the currency we ‘pay’ in order to ‘purchase’ new information and insight. As a scarce resource we cannot attend to everything; as William James, the grandfather of psychology, observed, attention “implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”

In order to survive, our ancestors needed to solve a particular problem: how to focus on finding the resources needed to survive – gathering roots and berries; searching for signs of prey – whilst simultaneously staying alert for threats and opportunities. Our brains appear to be arranged to enable us to focus on details whilst at the same time remaining aware of our surroundings. But, whilst this is possible, these two kinds of attention – the narrow focus on detail and the broad awareness of the environment – provide mutually incompatible data. The more closely we examine a tree, the less aware we become of the woods; the more we stand back to survey the woods, the harder it becomes to focus on individual trees.⁴

Close attention on what we already know about enables us to see vital details, but standing back provides us with a vantage to survey the unknown, allowing us to, as Iain McGilchrist puts it in Ways of Attending:

… see the world as separate from ourselves as something we can use, or as quite the opposite – as connected to ourselves more deeply: we can see others, for the first time, as beings like ourselves, the ground of empathy.

By focussing we are able to explain the world around us, by standing back we become open to intuitions and insights. The British-Hungarian polymath, Michael Polanyi explains that our ability to focus makes use of what he terms ‘subsidiary attention’. Essentially, although attention implies a withdrawal of focus from one set of things in order to concentrate on another, we nevertheless retain our subsidiary senses. So, for instance, if you were probing a tooth for a morsel of trapped food most of your attention would be on the food but you would retain the subsidiary awareness of your tongue. If you were to switch focus onto your tongue you would become less aware of the food morsel’s presence. When we read or write, we usually focus all our attention on meaning, but then we might notice a particularly interesting turn of phrase (or we might become confused) and our attention switches to focus on the subsidiarity of the texture of sounds / letters / syntax to resolve the difficulty, or enjoy the sensation, before we switch back to the text as a whole.⁵

When confronted with something unfamiliar our instinct is often to shut down and back away. If we can’t perceive a ‘way in’ then we’re likely to assume that this is ‘not for me’. When we try to make sense of, say, a Shakespeare play, our attention is directed at its unfamiliarity. We focus on what we don’t know and struggle to find points of reference. Similarly, poetry often presents an impenetrable façade but when we hear it read aloud – and when we see Shakespeare performed – we become better able to focus on meaning and shift the difficulties of the text into the background. As R.S. Thomas wrote, “poetry [and in this we’ll include all literature] is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart.”

In order to explain, or ‘make sense’ of something we must direct our focussed attention on to it. What we perceive with our subsidiary senses – what’s in the background – is known tacitly. For Polanyi, this kind of perception “constitutes an observation of external facts without recourse to formal argument”. We may notice something but be unable to explain it. This tacit understanding can feel intuitive; insights feel mysterious because we’re unable to explain them but are really just the emergence of half remembered fragments from the undistllled depths of memory. The act of noticing can – sometimes – trigger a subsidiary awareness of ‘unknown knowns’ in long-term memory without conscious retrieval. This flash of insight causes us to take in the detail and perceive the whole, but we can only explain our insight by losing sight of the whole to focus again on the detail. All serious readers have experienced these sudden strokes of perception and the attendant sense of loss when they vanish just as suddenly.

The openness to insight caused by noticing the relationship between the whole and its parts is akin to the state John Keats’ called ‘negative capability’: a state in which “a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. This isn’t, perhaps, a conscious prescription, more a habit to be cultivated. In order to pay attention to insight we must practise noticing the qualities of words and ideas without worrying about whether we ‘get it’ or reaching after the facts and certainties needed to pin down and explain our thoughts. These things should come, but we can help ourselves defer the need to switch back to that close attention to detail which precludes us from the tacit experience – the uncertainties, mysteries and doubts – of the whole.

Noticing can be directed towards any aspect of a text, but it is felt in the meaning we make as individual readers and writers. This may be in danger of sounding too otherworldly but the meaning we make is always a product of what we know. We can cultivate a feel for noticing by having our attention guided. My first experience of reading Ulysses really benefited from having a guide book at my side which I could use to add to my knowledge just at the point that I needed it to make sense of what I was reading, allowing me to arrive at an analogical understanding.⁶ Similarly, I saw so much more in Hamlet after reading What Happens in Hamlet?

In The American Scholar, Emerson discusses what he refers to as ‘creative reading’. He says,

When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world. We then see, what is always true, that as the seer’s hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or Shakespeare, only that least part,—only the authentic utterances of the oracle;—all the rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s and Shakespeare’s.

Who wouldn’t want every page we read to be “luminous with manifold allusion”? Well, the hard lesson is that it well take “hard labor and invention.” This is taken up in Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle’s book, This Thing Called Literature. They say,

Creative reading requires a curiosity about the past, an openness to discovering — with irony or delight — how eloquent, perceptive and thought-provoking writing from earlier centuries or decades can be, and how much you thought was new has in fact been (often more eloquently) said or done before. But creative reading can also entail a sense of trepidation and excitement about the future. Reading is an exposure to the unforeseeable. When you are reading a poem, a play, a piece of fiction — no matter how canonical it might be, no matter how many thousands of other people have read it and written about it — this reading is something that is happening only to you, with you, at this moment, for the first time in the history of the world. (p. 18)

They suggest that reading literature ought to be undertaken not only with curiosity anad openness to experience, but with a pen in hand. The ability to annotate, underline and make notes helps not only to engage with the ideas expressed but to add something of your own; to enter into a conversation with the text. Bennet and Royle warn that failing to annotate can have serious consequences. If you don’t annotate as you read, “you will forget what it was you found interesting or funny or sad or perplexing, and you won’t be able to find those particularly exciting, enticing, intriguing passages or moments again so easily. You may think you will, but you won’t.” I can attest to the truth of this observation. Any book worth engaging with beyond the superficial is worth writing in.

Analogising

If noticing is art, so too is the reader’s ability to make judicious analogies between this (what is currently being read) and that (all else that has been read). Close, or deep, reading requires that we pay attention in particular, specialised ways and, once we have learned to focus, to be able to experience new insights through seeing that what we are attending to is connected to things we have experienced previously.