What is slow reading?
Symposium Great Books Institute is a conversational reading community, so we decided to put the question to our seminar archons. Here are some of their answers:
Jason Happel | Slow Reading for Attentiveness
I think the main reason I participate in slow reading seminars is that I see the
effect it has on my capacity to pay attention to worthwhile things.
By paying attention, I mean allowing a text to speak for itself, or listening more carefully to the intent of a person’s words rather than to mistakes of vocabulary, grammar, logic, or politics.
Slow reading and conversation buy time to notice aspects of a text’s or someone’s words that point to something I wasn’t noticing — so a fuller meaning opens up.
Paying attention helps me let things be, before evaluating them.
Attentiveness, thwarted in a world (internal or external) of speed and noise,
can be practiced not only with regard to internal reactions as the meditators say, but also as part of a relationship with books.
Many of us consume books like fast food, but worthwhile books cannot be consumed.
One reason worthwhile books cannot be consumed is that they invite readers
to join the author on a guided walking tour as opposed to offering a platter of
propositions (I think even goes for Spinoza!) Anyone who has read Homer’s
Odyssey, Plato’s Republic, Dante’s Comedy, Machiavelli’s Discourses, or
Shakespeare’s plays, or any number of other works that depend on a reader’s
participation in a walking dialogue, knows or has sensed that such works cannot be grasped except by going through them and arriving at the end — having
experienced some of the guiding education necessary to understand the work
which is obtained only by going through the work. Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus is a good example of a work that shows how difficult it is to know an answer to a question prior to going through to the end: could Oedipus ever have understood the prophecy without having made the journey?
Practicing attentiveness works for me as an antidote to my bad habit of evaluating a text before I have even read it, before walking through it. My lack of attention can take the form of approaching the text as an example of a genre, or by keeping it in a historical pigeonhole, or even by the excusable exuberance of believing that the text contains the particular insights that I now need. We all hope that if we spend time with a text, it will reveal fruitful insights – but we impose on the text too much if we transform its insights to fit our needs (psychological,spiritual, political, or intellectual), rather than letting it be. The same goes for people, our friends or fellow readers.
I think that when I read slowly I do so because I cannot be sure that I am reading at all if I am not doing it slowly.
To be sure, doing it slowly is no guarantee that what I am doing is actually reading, but slow is the speed at which reading is likeliest to occur.
But what is reading, and what is slow? Is it slow because it is reading; is it reading because it is slow? What are the parts of reading?
Does it go something like this: the eye hears the otherwise inaudible sound the letters make to our sight; these taken together make a word; the word signifies; I remember what is signified; I collect all the other significations in the sentence; I set the words loose to let them talk to each other; I observe the conversation among the words and try to make sense of these my verbal interlocutors’ meanings? But do the words on the page talk to each other even before we do, even when we do not? Are they talking to each other even when the book is closed?
Is Hamlet stabbing Polonius when nobody is reading the play?
When the sounds of the Gita are not called up by the words’ being seen, does Arjuna sit idle between the two armies, the time of his awful decision suspended rather than impending? Is Socrates persuading Aristophanes and Agathon on the unity of comedy and tragedy just before sunup in the darkness of closed pages?
Is Emily Dickinson “shut up in Prose” when her poetic turns are closed off from view? Is Baby Suggs exhorting her people to love their flesh when there is no mind’s eye remembering her in the clearing speaking the words?
Does the categorical imperative urge itself when the books are all closed and the clocks of Konigsberg read three before the meridian, while all the shopkeepers of the town rest from their time-keeping and the brain of a precise philosopher bodies forth nothing more than incoherent dreams?
The question may be more serious than I am making it sound. Slow is the speed at which we defy Time by daring to assert Being in the face of Becoming.
Reading is trying to see the river of images in all their panoramic, kaleidoscopic profusion in the light of the sun, so as to say from time to time, without offending the modesty of nature: I too am mortal, I too am in the river, I too am passing on, but like these bold words on the page, I have stood still and held steady my gaze for a moment and I have caught a glimpse of the mighty stream, now only its glimmer, now again its scintillating beauty. We do not read to read slowly; we read slowly to read.
As for myself, the dim perception of the blinking, flickering picture of my own life would have been an even more rattling riddle of the ridiculous than it has been without the intermittent injection of reality from reading. Consider if you will: the distance from Delphi to Thebes is fifty-five miles, an hour’s drive on a modern highway — what, a twenty-plus-hour hike for a hearty walker, a couple of days if we allow time for blisters, feeding, weather, recovery from road rage? How long did it take Oedipus to get there?
How long did it take from the crossroads where he unknowingly killed his own father, a place between Delphi and Thebes, to reach the Sphinx whom he defeated with his unaccountable insight into the life cycle of a human being? to go from king-killer to king? from father-killer to father? from hero to husband? from mother’s son to
mother’s mate? from prophecy to problem-solving? What is the time-space continuum for Apollonian self-knowledge?
Soon after the Civil War, when the bold young Jane Pittman asks a strange but kind man how long it will take her to walk from Louisiana to Ohio with the little boy for whom she cares, he tells her, probably about thirty years.
By the time Kennedy is president, she is well over a hundred, but still hasn’t made it out of Louisiana. If Oedipus is around twenty when he gets to Thebes, he is probably about forty when he discovers how to read the old ankle scars, the dim signs that had receded in size; they had been large enough to read only when he was too little to read them. By the time he is old enough to see, they are almost too small to be seen. The tragedy is the song of his seeing. Reading seems to happen slowly.
Reynaldo Miranda | Slowly, attentively, carefully, respectfully.
Since I can remember, about 55 years, I like to listen and watch, to take things in, and reflect upon them.
Like most persons, I’m blind and deaf to almost everything around me, but not to things that seem important, and especially significant, to me. So my attention is directed, commanded, by a succession of partial views. I’m one of those people who are horrible at small talk as well, so terrible that I’m a wall flower at social gatherings. But, if I have something in common to talk about, something that I care about, well, it’s just the opposite, very engaged and engaging—energizing–, I can at the very least hold up my end of a conversation. So for me, one chief starting point is to look at what it is we talk about in Symposium.
First, let me say what we don’t talk about, just as Herodotus tells us something about the Hellenic people by looking at the nations around them, at who they are not. This approach also helps get impediments out of the way. We don’t talk about great technical, specialist or scholarly books, whether by and for other economists, or astrophysicists, or philologists. We don’t talk about the latest bestsellers. We don’t talk about merely very good and useful books.
We don’t talk about books because they happened to have been written by authors who happen to be female, or who happen to be rectangular shaped folks rather than triangular ones. We don’t gossip, or talk about the weather or the war in Ukraine. We don’t talk about books because we happen to agree with them, or happen to disagree with them. We don’t talk about books because we find them charming or repulsive. All such conversations have their own ways, and modes of talking appropriate to the content of each, and to how the discussants specifically take them up.
So, once again, what then do we talk about?
We don’t talk about books because they happened to have been written by authors who happen to be female, or who happen to be rectangular shaped folks rather than triangular ones. We don’t gossip, or talk about the weather or the war in Ukraine. We don’t talk about books because we happen to agree with them, or happen to disagree with them. We don’t talk about books because we find them charming or repulsive. All such conversations have their own ways, and modes of talking appropriate to the content of each, and to how the discussants specifically take them up.
So, once again, what then do we talk about?
We talk about books, or pieces of music, or paintings. Those many people call “great, classic, canonical.” I don’t want to open up the messy argumentation of which works are and aren’t such. But I can reference the differences in principle, those guides of our discernment. These books seriously explore what it is to be a person, in a community of persons. And they do so in superlatively profound ways, that is, they are our best models of inquiry. Most of them have been around for a long time, many generations, and people on different continents keep reading them again and again. All of them are effectively inexhaustible artifacts. That is, it is not only the specialist scholars who dedicate their entire working lives to them writing monographs, generation to generation, but, even much more importantly, the common everyreader who elicits new resources each time she re-reads the Gilgamesh poet, or Lavoisier, or Aristotle, or Douglass, or Mozart, from adolescence through old age. Such books are foundational, primary, paradigmatic, they reach down to the very roots of our being, and can shake us out of our tiredness, our forgetfulness, our fogginess, by yanking out the iffy ground from under us. And from such inquiries derive other accounts.
Further, these books are in conversation with one another, across borders, across centuries and epochs. If I have bootstraps, these are the chief ones to which I can have recourse (first things first, and in a certain way the first things are also the last).
A good selection of such works is something like Ali Baba’s Cave, the tale an early 18th C. Frenchman added to the 1,001 Nights.
Further, these books are in conversation with one another, across borders, across centuries and epochs. If I have bootstraps, these are the chief ones to which I can have recourse (first things first, and in a certain way the first things are also the last).
A good selection of such works is something like Ali Baba’s Cave, the tale an early 18th C. Frenchman added to the 1,001 Nights.
Slowly, attentively, carefully, respectfully. This is much more difficult than it may seem at first glance, but we can practice and cultivate our reading, together. Over time and a bit of patient, persistent work, we can become better readers of Shakespeare, Euclid, Aquinas, Faulkner, and Bach.
What is involved in such a discipline—what is part of their challenge to us? As a reader I have to be still, and let the work be and act as it was made, not how I wish it were or were not. I need to be receptive and focused which in our hurly-burly world is not always easy. I need to wait upon myself to catch up a bit to the work I am reading, rather than rush past it. I need to let the author speak, rather than cut her off and impose with my own paltry chatter, or that which an expert has proposed. I need to try and hear the work on its own terms, not mine or ours. In this we can help each other, whether as participants or facilitators, the latter being after all merely more advanced participants. “A good beginning is more than half the battle.” Before we can wander off into the historical context that may take us back to Adam and Eve; before we can go down the rabbit holes of the scholarly opinions, critical apparatus, methodologies, and schools of interpretation; before we can compare and contrast, and evaluate, we really ought to understand what these authors are saying to us. To suspend one’s own baggage one brings to a reading and discussion is not always easy, habits must be nurtured, and we can help each other do this.
What is involved in such a discipline—what is part of their challenge to us? As a reader I have to be still, and let the work be and act as it was made, not how I wish it were or were not. I need to be receptive and focused which in our hurly-burly world is not always easy. I need to wait upon myself to catch up a bit to the work I am reading, rather than rush past it. I need to let the author speak, rather than cut her off and impose with my own paltry chatter, or that which an expert has proposed. I need to try and hear the work on its own terms, not mine or ours. In this we can help each other, whether as participants or facilitators, the latter being after all merely more advanced participants. “A good beginning is more than half the battle.” Before we can wander off into the historical context that may take us back to Adam and Eve; before we can go down the rabbit holes of the scholarly opinions, critical apparatus, methodologies, and schools of interpretation; before we can compare and contrast, and evaluate, we really ought to understand what these authors are saying to us. To suspend one’s own baggage one brings to a reading and discussion is not always easy, habits must be nurtured, and we can help each other do this.
The manner of conversation together follows from our manner of reading individually, as sketched above. Some people take to seminar as ducks to water. I was not one. Initially I had a hard time getting a word in amongst more talkative participants, and I tended to be impatient with silly utterances and meanderings, even though on many occasions I say foolish things and meander myself.
But after many years of sticking with it, I am much better at it than I was at the beginning, though I still have a ways to go. As a facilitator I try to ask an opening question that intends to be one way into the text, to open it up a bit, whether immediately or a little later on—the “open sesame” of the forty thieves. Often I merely try to call attention to an aspect or passage that may have been overlooked or too little considered. In the best seminars, the conversation takes a shape and direction as we discuss together, it becomes one common conversation a little like a choral work of many different voices, and there is a palpable energy, and at the end nearly everyone wants to reread and discuss further, with more questions than when we began. But of course, not every seminar is like this, from time to time there are duds, so it may not be for the faint of heart or the very impatient. It may seem that there are no“rules” or customs, because such are minimal in order to support fruitful, common, serious conversation and may become as it were invisible. As we get to know each other, we may forget about them, something like a second nature. The rules are there to support while not obtruding. It might be something like an athlete or artist who is so good that she makes it look easy. But there are limits to this illusion. A thing that is hard cannot be made to appear as easy, like “the lies schoolmasters tell children” according to Henry Adams, or Michael Oakeshott’s backhanded introduction of Isaiah Berlin at the London School of Economics: that “Berlin is the Paganini of intellectual history.”
But after many years of sticking with it, I am much better at it than I was at the beginning, though I still have a ways to go. As a facilitator I try to ask an opening question that intends to be one way into the text, to open it up a bit, whether immediately or a little later on—the “open sesame” of the forty thieves. Often I merely try to call attention to an aspect or passage that may have been overlooked or too little considered. In the best seminars, the conversation takes a shape and direction as we discuss together, it becomes one common conversation a little like a choral work of many different voices, and there is a palpable energy, and at the end nearly everyone wants to reread and discuss further, with more questions than when we began. But of course, not every seminar is like this, from time to time there are duds, so it may not be for the faint of heart or the very impatient. It may seem that there are no“rules” or customs, because such are minimal in order to support fruitful, common, serious conversation and may become as it were invisible. As we get to know each other, we may forget about them, something like a second nature. The rules are there to support while not obtruding. It might be something like an athlete or artist who is so good that she makes it look easy. But there are limits to this illusion. A thing that is hard cannot be made to appear as easy, like “the lies schoolmasters tell children” according to Henry Adams, or Michael Oakeshott’s backhanded introduction of Isaiah Berlin at the London School of Economics: that “Berlin is the Paganini of intellectual history.”
Why do I do this? This habitus eventually helps me stand on my own two feet, and not parrot what I hear or see or hear around me, chase after the banners of other parties this way and that. It is a never-ending, active task to liberate my mind from foreign bondage, subornment, and manipulation. How to weigh evidence and testimony, what are the fundamental premises, how to form and dissect arguments, what manner of inquiry is appropriate to different matters, how to re-cognize things, how to distinguish things, discern good and bad, how to untangle the several senses of terms and phrases. Symposium enriches my life, ennoble me. And it isn’t a guilty pleasure!
David Saussy | Slowing down, coming to a stop and wondering.
The authors and works on great books lists are in some ways like Olympian figures. But it seems to me they are also rather like those daimonic beings, living in the shadowy interstices, the outskirts, or the muddy muck, or remote hinterland of our intellectual imaginations – informing, shaping, directing our own thinking often invisibly, even without our awareness.
To begin to identify these hidden sources, to put them to the question: this is how we can begin to work our way free of them. Free not necessarily to reject them or pitch them away, but free, at least, to begin to understand, perhaps for the first time, to stand upright in our own thinking. Sometimes that means going deeper into certain books, and the thinking of authors, than we ever thought possible.
What makes the greatest books hard is not the usual suspects, their historical remoteness or terminology or even length, but what we bring to them. That is, our “garb of ideas”, or our settled layers of opinions, beliefs and prejudices – our derivative or anonymous ideas, which originated in someone else’s mind somewhere else long ago.
If I settle for explanations by professionals about the great book (through articles or lectures), but never have the sustained opportunity to examine my own beliefs and reflect on experience, can I have said to learn anything?
If you have ever spent time hiking in the mountains, you learn quickly that the way you walk on a mountain path must be very different from walking on a sidewalk in a city. This is not a matter of interpretation. There is necessarily a different rhythm to hiking and a different awareness you bring to the walking. Ascent and descent are different, involving different muscles and different kinds of movement.
In this way, slowing down means something like adopting a walking pace for reading, as if we were hiking: and this involves coming to a stop in our tracks, if it’s needed. We need to be free to stop reading and to think.
Everything seems depend on whether we are willing to let the book work on us in this way.
There is no avoiding it: without slowing down, we will have missed both what’s best in the books and in our own souls.
“Starting with Don Quijote to our latest endeavor, The Last Puritan, meeting with our group has become one of the highlights of my week, each and every single week.
Joining Symposium is one of the best things I have done for myself. Wonderful and challenging selections, stimulating and insightful discussions and the slow pace reading contribute to a most satisfying and enlightening learning experience.
It is with much joy and pleasure that I will continue to participate for as long as I am able.”
–Gloria Hinojosa, participant in the “Arc of Modernity with the Great Books of Iberia” pathway
Slow reading case study: Jim Rice
The slow reading program complements other learning ventures. David Saussy discusses slow reading with long time participant Jim Rice about his experiences at Symposium Great Books Institute.
