id: onreading title: On Reading previous: thestart next: mop date: 2021-01-06 ---

## On Reading

I think that reading does not quite get the credit for the marvelous thing it is in the public eye. It is pretty rare to hear people talking very much about reading anymore and the phrase “I don’t read” has become more and more common.

I would like to make a case for reading. It has a few things going for it that I don’t think any other medium has. More than anything else reading is a purely cerebral experience. There is nothing else intensely stimulating in the activity to pull your attention away from the ideas being conveyed. And conveyed they are. Writing is the crystallization of ideas into words, there is nothing else the author has to concern themselves with, and the act of writing helps to clarify and hone the thoughts. Therefore books when written well often deliver the purest idea, honed by writing and editing to the reader.

Reading a book is like having a conversation, albeit a unidirectional one, with the author. Similar to a lecture, reading is an act of listening and parsing the information given. Like most other distributed media it transcends distance, once a book is published you don’t need direct access to the author to benefit from their ideas contained within. Unlike most media however it also transcends time. We have only had film and recorded music for coming up on 100 years now. There is no way to communicate with anyone beyond that point in time. Oral traditions are the only method of communication older than writing and that runs into the space problems of needing to be with a storyteller. By reading I have access to the teachers from the entirety of recorded human history.

There are ideas and ways of thinking that have fallen by the wayside. This does not make them less valuable, just forgotten. The words and the books that they have left behind are the only way to find these ideas in their original form. There are a few in the modern age that try to spread them and teach them to the new generations, but this is also almost always in the form of writing books. It is the only way to connect to the timeless wisdom found in the older texts that have survived and maintained relevance. If something has been around and useful for a few hundred or even a thousand years I think it bears looking into.

Reading is one of the few actions these days that force us to slow down, and focus on a single thing. You can’t chat while reading, you can’t watch a show, work, or eat very well (when I try to read and eat I end up spending more time finding my place than reading). In a world that increasingly moves faster and demands more of our time moments of slowness and peace are more valuable than ever.

Taking the time to absorb an idea, roll it around in your head, and come to conclusions about it is fantastic, almost meditative. Reading a thing takes time, so it forces some level of contemplation. We are bombarded with all sorts of bite sized opinions and ideas, those often provoke a strong emotional response and very little conscious thought. Spending the extra time with it forces us to think, let that initial gut reaction no longer be our only point of reference. I am not saying that the gut is always wrong, instinct and intuition are valuable tools, but more and more things are designed to take advantage of that system. It is much harder to do that to someone's critical thinking.

Reading is beautiful and often seems to be the cure to a lot of the ailments of the modern day. When we are always told to go faster and do more, reading forces us to sit still and think. When all our senses are constantly bombarded by all sorts of stimulation reading forces us to give them a rest, except for the occasional eye strain when you get into a really good book and can’t put it down.

It forces us to exercise our imagination. With modern technology our movies and shows are so realistic that we no longer have to use our imagination to picture things. I can’t help but think there is a massive benefit practicing being able to picture things we have not seen in our heads.

So that is my case for reading. I hope my thoughts on the topic were interesting.