The Forgotten Art of Slow Reading, Part 4
- January 10, 2022
- David
- 0
One of the great difficulties with so many great books style seminars is that too much reading is covered in too short of a period of time.
A typical seminar – whether in terminal degree and certificate programs, or not – will cover 50 pages of reading, and then attempt to talk about the whole reading. And as a consequence the conversation will only skate the surface, and never really get into the details.
It’s like we’re in such a rush just to finish the book. But why the hurry?
What can be done?
You guessed it.
Slow.
Down.
This is where we find our super power, like those virtuoso musicians I mentioned last week.
But deeper than this, we find our habits of thinking around ‘finishing’ impeding our path forward. So I ask: does it matter whether we actually finish the book? I mean, you want to finish,of course.
But not at the sacrifice of gaining a real appreciation of the what the author is really up to in the book.
And all too often that is what happens. When books are read too quickly, just so we can ‘finish’ them, we all too easily form ideas – often very conventional and even wrong ideas – of a book that doesn’t really map onto the actual territory, the actual warp and weft of the text’s interwoven structure. (This happens all the time with authors like Plato and so many other ancient authors.)
Even more, I submit that reading – learning, reflecting and conversing – is a whole lot more like dancing. The point of dancing is not to get to the end, but to be right in the middle of it. It’s the quality of the experience that counts.
These books are built for life, to live with, to get into the middle of, not merely to get to the end and move on to something else. Of course they were built this way, because these books were made in those prior centuries when things were actually built to last.
This slowing down process – even if you don’t reach the end of the book – will give you more sustained contact with the author’s actual thinking, and you’ll have a far better sense of what they are up to, than in any other approach.
Trust the process, trust the conversation. Most of us are unused to having conversations that are focused and purposive, yet unplanned. By “unplanned”, I mean that the seminar leader does not have a list of planned talking points, but rather wants to explore a text with you.
We fall easily into monologue – seminar leaders can too – and we easily take conversation to be one long string of monologues. Video conferencing makes this all the more tempting, and we have to be on guard about it. Think of conversation as a practice – of listening, of reflecting and speaking and sharing.
When I was new to this practice as an undergraduate student at St. John’s College, it took me awhile to realize that you don’t need your thoughts to be completely worked out to offer it to the conversation. Sometimes whole seminars would flash by because my Grand Thought (which wasn’t really so grand) wasn’t ready yet. I was still working it out. I thought I had to have everything figures out before speaking.
I learned by hard experience that the conversation as a whole goes much better if you don’t have it all worked out. You have to risk exposing yourself. A lot of what I offered at first felt totally dumb. And sometimes still does. But that’s okay. The spontaneity and unfinished character of conversations – let alone the spirit of friendship at the table – actually promotes understanding.
There’s a sort of honesty that pervades the experience (Socrates eludes to this at several points in the Republic and in other dialogues), and it’s a condition that helps foster the unexpected insights that we can get in no other way.
The conversational pathway, at bottom, is a way of building.
We join our thinking and our questioning with each other. There’s a power and delight in meeting others, in joining thoughts with theirs, on a difficult problem. All the more so today when it sometimes seems there is only…shouting.
The purpose of conversation could never be to simply to express yourself, or your likes and dislikes. Otherwise, it’s like we’re just separate little islands or ships passing in the night.
If you want a useful way to join the conversation, even if you don’t yet have a formed thought: ask questions and listen.
If someone offers an idea, and it is not clear how it arises from the text, ask about that. Where do you see this connecting with the text? Get specific: ask for page number, a line number, a paragraph.
Further, you can offer a restatement, in your own words: so do I hear you saying that such and so is the case. Some surprising things can come simply from trying to restate what another person is saying in your own words. In fact, so of our effort of listening is simply trying to restate in our own words what we think we are hearing.
Another way to join the conversation, is to join several comments or thoughts. One person said such and so a few minutes ago. Now someone is saying something different. If the two thoughts seem contradictory or just different, ask about that. If they are similar, it might be worth connecting them – since they may have framed their thoughts in different ways. Those differences and similarities can be worth looking into.
Conversation – especially conversational reading – stirs up our minds – our thinking and our feeling. So expect to be stirred. You’ll walk away from the conversation with more questions than you arrived with.
But something interesting happens in the process.
Your awareness of the underlying material will be expanded and sharpened. This awareness comes from direct experience – your own experience and no one else’s – with the primary source that cannot be substituted by any other means.
Hearing all those different opinions can be such a great source of delight, and helps unpack the reading for you in a way no lecture can. But if it is sometime an irritation, it’s an irritation that might be worth having.