Slow Reading

It’s a common trope that reading has diminished of late, especially since the advent of ubiquitous screen technology, but the demise likely predated the i-pad and e-reader. Television is a culprit, but so are comic books and glossy magazines. Then there’s the effect of the mass-education system and all of its ideological propaganda. At least they used to do this via actual books, but perhaps now it’s mostly electronic, what books there be, so even more mind-numbing.

Books are in fact a quasi-miracle. The ancient world had far fewer of them, prohibitively expensive as they were. Theirs was largely an oral society, whose wisdom was handed on by stories and tradition, through families and clans and villages.

What books there were, were precious indeed. To save vellum, I suppose, the letters were all crammed together, with no spaces. Hence, the reading of books was also done orally – that is, they were read out loud, so one could make sense of the words. They were meditated upon, chewed over, digested, as Guigo the Carthusian so aptly describes in his 12th century Ladder of Monks.

I always wondered why Saint Augustine was surprised when he noticed Saint Ambrose reading without speaking and moving his lips. As the author of this article on ‘slow reading’ recounts:

As a scholar of the history of Christianity, I see again and again how cultural practices, including reading, depend on their material conditions. Until about the year 1000 C.E., most books were written in a style known as scriptio continua, which presented text as an unbroken stream of letters with no cues for where one word ended and the next began. These texts could not be skimmed. They had to be read aloud to “allow the ear to disentangle what to the eye seemed a continuous string of signs,” as the essayist and novelist Alberto Manguel put it.

In early medieval Europe, monasteries were the principal sites of both reading and book production. Monks and nuns read out loud for hours each day—slowly, contemplatively, and prayerfully, in a mode known as lectio divina. The absence of spacing between words compelled readers to linger and reread with care, rolling each syllable in the mouth like a sip of wine, attentive to every nuance. Reading the Bible and other spiritual classics in this way, explained the 12th-century Carthusian monk Guigo, offered “a ladder for monks by which they are lifted up from earth to heaven.”

I used to want to learn to speed read, and developed some techniques. I suppose it has its place – some, if not most, books should only be skimmed – but it never felt natural. Ideally, reading should be for leisure, done for its own sake. We should learn to savour books, as the above author later says, like deep red wine. For Aristotle, the wise man is a man of few books – but those few are well read and pondered.

In these last days of Lent as we proceed into Holy Week, pick up a good book, and keep up the habit of reading, or develop it if you have it not. Even better, dust off the Good Book. Read sections, slowly, meditatively, along with the Liturgy in these holiest of days. Allow the Word to speak to you, and lead you where He would have you go.

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