Reading to Realize

I've always loved reading. I learned to read early, and I grew up reading anything and everything I could get my hands on, sometimes multiple times. Now that I'm older, I've found it necessary to develop my thoughts in regards to why, how, and what we read.

Oswald Chambers advises, "Don't read to remember - read to realize."¹ I think this is excellent counsel. Few of us retain everything we read perfectly, (C. S. Lewis was reputed to have this ability) and attempting to memorize it all is futile and frustrating. Realization must be our primary goal. As John Holt observed, in his delightful book Learning All The Time, "Our minds are much more powerful when discovering than memorizing, not least of all because discovering is more fun."²

Reading to realize requires making reading into an active occupation, not just a passive pastime. Always read with a highlighter, a pen, and (optionally) a notepad. Those of us who have qualms about marking up our books need to get over that first if we're going to get anywhere else. As Mortimer Adler says, "Marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love." (His entire essay on the subject - How to Mark a Book - is well worth reading, and marking up.)

Personally, I feel it's important to read books, not e-books. Computer-based reading impairs one's ability to concentrate; we are rushed, distracted, sloppy. The structure of the internet has taught us to scan information quickly, looking for what we want. This is a fine technique for negotiating through cyberspace, but it's a poor strategy for reading.

(You might ask me, in light of this, why I blog, and I would tell you that it's because blogging is cheaper than writing books. Better to practice with the inexpensive ebony before you attempt to carve the real stuff.)

Now then, what books should we read that will help us realize the real? Franz Kafka, writing to a friend, said this:

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves.
What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.³

While Kafka's sentiments may be slightly overstated, this remains one of the most inspiring paragraphs I have ever read about reading. (While we're on the subject, blogger and seminary student Trevin Wax has some good advice on what to read in his incisive essay On Reading Widely.)

I used to think that life was too short to read fiction. I now think the opposite - life is too short not to read fiction. A story does not need to "have happened" in order to be "true." We can catch glimpses of profound truths in stories that we might never see in systematic explanations. Long live the fiction story. And fantasy, too.

Reading is properly done somewhere comfortable and quiet, outdoors, preferably, if the light is adequate and the weather is commodious. Bring a glass of water, and perhaps some snacks - peanuts, maybe, or sliced fruit. And don't be afraid to lay the book on your lap, pet the dog, and stop and think. It's not about having the most books or even reading the most books - it's about realizing as much as we can. To learn is to remember. As Socrates said, "All inquiry and all learning is but recollection."⁴

What are you waiting for? Switch off this computer and go find a book!

(1) Oswald Chambers, Disciples Indeed (The Complete Works of Oswald Chambers (Grand Rapids: Discovery House, 2000), 400

(2) John Holt, Learning All The Time, (De Capo Press, 1990), 53
(3) Franz Kafka, as quoted in James Sire, Habits of the Mind (InterVarsity Press, 2000), 174
(4) Socrates, Meno, as quoted in Steven M. Cahn, Classic and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Education, (McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1997), 14

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