(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Ulin is an American book critic and author.
A professional reader who framed the world through books, he found himself losing the ability to read (Ulin 2010, 3). He could no longer read how he used to—“a hundred or so pages every evening” (p. 35)—because now when he begins reading his mind wanders to e-mail and the Internet, distracted by technology and current events (ibid.). His struggle was “the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs, quick takes and fragments, that add up to the anxiety of the age” (ibid.). Ulin’s reflections on this now common situation suggest how we might cope with these problems.
In our “overnetworked society”, we can fall for the illusion that “speed can lead us to illumination, that it is more important to react than to think deeply” (p. 34). Books, however, “insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down” (ibid.). Literature is a “cutting to the chase” in a culture of noisy distraction (p. 25). It opposes our “ever-present now” in which there’s “a sense of skittering across the surface, a feeling of drift, both mental and emotional, in which time and context become unmoored” (p. 76). Reading well “demands space” and “a certain kind of silence”: “by drawing us back from the primacy of the instant it restores time to us in a more fundamental way. It’s not possible to read a book in the present, for books exist in many moments all at once.” (pp. 34, 80). Reading forces us to pay attention, which brings us back into contact with our inner life (p. 80). We both posses the books we read, and let them posses us (p. 16). In reading The Great Gatsby: “Fitzgerald inhabits me and I animate him” (p. 148). In this realm “we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being” (p. 16).
This fragile intimacy of reading is also threatened by e-readers and reading on screens because they tempt us to multitask (pp. 131–3). The object of the physical book, however, can bring to mind our previous experience of reading it, and also serve as part of our culture’s collective memory (pp. 123, 129). Kindle e-books that can’t be directly shared with other people compromise “our common informational heritage” (p. 123). In this way, “e-books privatise the public elements of reading” while “the physical library effectively does the reverse” (p. 128).
Ulin came to see “an act of resistance” in reading, a “matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage” (p. 150). Instead of surrendering to informational overload, seeking information at its most instant, reading slowly forces a “reckoning with time”: we’re made to pace ourselves (ibid.). By slightly withdrawing from the world we regain it, joining “a broader conversation, by which we both transcend ourselves and are enlarged” (p. 151). We are enlarged because reading helps us engage in self-identification, encouraging us to identify with other people (p. 102). It can function as a template, on which certain emotional states or experiences are imprinted, with which we come to a reckoning with life (ibid.). It blurs divisive boundaries between us and common narratives are essential for living in community [Ulin (2010), pp. (pp. 148, 37–8). Reading in this way is a meditative act, “with all of meditation’s attendant difficulty and grace” (p. 151).
Ulin began re-learning to read by retiring to his office alone, away from distractions. He found that he needed “silence—not to disconnect but as a respite, to uncover a little piece of stillness in the din” (p. 147). Once he got used to this environment he started to get situated with The Great Gatsby, which he’d found so difficult to reread as a distracted adult, by paging through some passages, which transported him back into the world of the novel (p. 148). Soon he found that he could read briskly without distraction, almost as if “a teenager again” (ibid.). He had no agenda, and “was reading purely for the sake of reading, for the play of the sentences, for the flow of the narrative” (ibid.). He concludes: “I sit down. I try to make a place for silence. It’s harder than it used to be, but still, I read” (p. 151).