On Reading

One is informed that there is now a “reading community,” a phrase which turns an ordinary educated habit into a specialised enthusiasm and perhaps tells us more than was intended.

Reading is literacy kept in practice, and belongs among the ordinary requirements of a mind which intends to remain in working order. Treating it as a special interest, complete with a vocabulary of identity and belonging, measures the distance from the age in which I was educated.

In the first decade of this century, which is to say the century before yours, the great project of the age was the expansion of literacy to every man, woman, and child in the kingdom. Public libraries were being built at a pace that reflected genuine civic ambition. The Education Acts had made schooling compulsory, and the understanding, shared across political divisions that agreed upon almost nothing else, was that a literate population was the foundation upon which everything else would be constructed: industry, governance, moral reasoning, and the capacity for self-improvement. Reading was not a pastime. Reading was the mechanism by which a person became capable of independent thought, and its absence was understood, correctly, as a form of captivity.

That men of your era, who have access to more written material than any generation in the history of the species, read less than their grandfathers did have failed in more than habit. Your grandfathers, many of them, contended for the right to be educated. They walked miles to borrow a single book from a lending library. They read by candlelight because the alternative was ignorance, and ignorance, in their experience, was not the gentle fog your era has made of it but a cage with economic locks.

A gentleman was expected to read regardless of his profession or immediate interests, because a man who neglects books must take too much of the world on trust. Sustained reading remains one of the more reliable ways of encountering ideas beyond those already one’s own; without it, the mind may continue to move while travelling in a very small circle.

What you read matters less than that you read. A novel will do; a history will do; a biography, an essay, a volume of letters from a period not your own. What will not do is the consumption of fragments: the scrolling through headlines and summaries and the opinions of strangers delivered in sentences too short to contain a thought worth having. This is the sensation of reading, emptied of its substance, and the mind that subsists upon it will come to resemble, over time, the material it consumes: shallow, reactive, confident without cause, and unable to sustain attention across a paragraph of any length.

Read for thirty minutes a day, on paper when possible, because a book invites fewer interruptions than a screen. The interval may feel unexpectedly long at first after years of fragmented attention, but the capacity returns when it is used regularly.