Becoming Conscious

Why We Read

Jun 22, 2023

“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all of the sorrows of familial and passional life… Reading well is best pursued as an implicit discipline; finally there is no method but yourself, when your self has been fully molded.” -Harold Bloom

six black and gold hardbound books — Photo by Elena Kloppenburg on Unsplash

The great editor and the great literary critic have one thing in common, they are both great readers. For Robert Gottlieb and Harold Bloom, this is particularly the case. Their breadth of worked crossed into each other’s arenas. The two New Yorkers, born a year apart, were both authors and editors and both central figures of the modern literature era.

Robert Gottlieb, the famed editor of Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker, edited books by John le Carré, Joseph Heller, and Doris Lessing. Toni Morrison and Chaim Potok. Robert Caro, Bill Clinton, and Bob Dylan. John Cheever, Salman Rushdie, and Ray Bradbury. If only to name a few. Gottlieb was not fond of writing, though somehow still managed to write eight books. As I started to draft this post last week, Robert Gottlieb was still alive. But the luck of the world was painted black, as he died last week.1 The literary world lost an ardent supporter and champion of the great world of books and we are better for his contribution and indefatigable work ethic.

For much of Harold Bloom’s professional career, he was a professor of the Yale English Department. He would also teach at New York University while he maintained his Yale teaching post. However, he is most well-known for his profound literary criticism that still reverberates through the literary world. Bloom loved books, probably more than you or I love anything. He was a devotee to the idea of the Western canon, or a series of cultural classics viewed as must-read books.23 He also wrote more than 50 books and edited hundreds more. Bloom was an enthusiast of memorizing and reciting poetry including all of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the entirety of Milton’s Paradise Lost. His level of enthusiasm to bring his excitement of reading to others transpired by teaching people how to read and understand that there is no single way to read any type of writing. Bloom died in 2019.4

Their literary accomplishments are no small feat. The idea of reading deeply and broadly are what these two championed and what follows is a thinking of why we read and how they achieved this level of consciousness.

There are many reasons we read, but some, I believe, are more merited than others. Reading “as an implicit discipline,” as Harold Bloom writes in How to Read and Why,5 is the most important habit of reading. But why do we read?

Reading is not only a solitary pursuit, but it is self-invested and self-interested. It is the basis of our development of self. This all sounds quite selfish; I assure you it is, as we do this not as a public service but of our own desire of self-improvement. You may take a moralistic approach by reading for others (or what others want you to read), but you will find a lack of enthusiasm in your motivation to read. It is through this, for lack of a better word, selfishness that we can become better people. As Bloom adds, “if you become an authentic reader, then the response to your labors will confirm you as an illumination to others.” Not all selfish acts are evil as some lead to betterment of self, which in turn helps us understand each other.

As we read, we come to understand characters, which are variations of people. While some writer’s imaginations are remarkable, the basis of characters is what we know about people. Our understanding is limited to our own experience and that experience may not be the best marker. Reading to know more people, in fact, becomes a more interesting approach to reading a novel, for example. We become more invested in the characters and read to understand their being rather than for the plot alone. In his memoir, Avid Reader,6 Robert Gottlieb describes how he viewed reading: “From the start, words were more real to me than real life, and certainly more interesting.” While I am making my own assessment as to what his words encompass, reading through his memoir, he was a studier of people and it stands to reason that it is hard to understand humans as we hide parts of ourselves. We can find a deeper understanding of people through books than without.

Finally, you may decide the educational merit of reading is worthy. This, however, implies a blind acceptance of the message the writer is trying to convey. Ultimately, we want to read to be challenged, both intellectually and philosophically. Much like we exercise to challenge our mental fortitude and physical bodies. As Bloom writes, “One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change alas is universal.” The universal being death. Time being the only thing that stands between us and our eventual extinction of self. We should read to prepare ourselves for death just as we should read to understand how to best use our time, which are one in the same.

Gottlieb describes reading as “like breathing.” And so is this wondrous act that can shape our lives in a myriad of ways that few activities can. What follows is a deeper dive into each of these reasons of why.

Reading as Education

Consistently, there is one educational realization I come to with reading and that is how little I know. I don’t say this as a humble anecdote. I could stand to be slightly less conceited. It’s how little all of us collectively know and understand about the world we live in. Wisdom is a nice philosophical concept, and it is important, but there is some fallacy to the idea that we can attain this fleeting yet undefinable thing. Fleeting because we continuously find new information that proves our held beliefs wrong. Undefinable because what we categorize as wisdom are not things we all agree with.

Our hard-nosed ideologies that we believe as true wisdom, we continue to disagree and fight verbal and physical wars over. This includes religious views, philosophical views, political views, economic views, educational views, etc. This is the forum in which we cohabitate. If we had a true sense of what is real versus what is dictated to us by the powerful, we would not continue to fall for the same traps. If we take a step back, we can agree, as an understanding, that wisdom is the grasp of both education and experience. This definition of wisdom is given to us by the dictionary. However, our view of wisdom coincides and is weighed down by our own dogma. This isn’t a recent phenomenon; the light is cast throughout history. We only have to look at our bigotry to see how our dogmatic views have shaped history. Wisdom is not an established act in the moment, but a rearview mirror of understanding.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.” This is the same Thomas Jefferson that owned slaves (and even fathered children with one of them)7 and would eventually change his views away from Christianity,8 as many people continue to be surprised to hear since some are adamant that the United States was founded only by Christians. This is not an effort to ridicule who he was, what he did, or what his beliefs were. It is simply an illustration that we are all almost certainly wrong about something and there is more life to challenging our beliefs than with haphazardly accepting them as truth.

If you choose to seek education, I believe the most honest approach is in understanding what those outside of your own limited range of experience hold true, which in turn will help us make a real assessment of what we actually believe. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird,9 Atticus Finch tells his daughter, Scout, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” Otherwise, your blind acceptance of what you believe to be true will never hold the water from where it came. Reading history, philosophy, and religious texts (not just our own) becomes especially important.

Reading in Solitude

With so many distractions living inside and outside of us, I like to refer to Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, who once said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”10 I will admit that I like my solitude a little too much. Some people refuse solitude out of fear of being alone with his or her thoughts. So, what do we do? We reach for distractions: phones, television, alcohol, drugs, porn, video games, food, social media, etc. For me, it has been my phone lately. I can find whatever distraction I want on it. Crossword puzzles and social media especially. These may seem harmless, but I don’t believe in the harmless nature of addictive distractions. Our drugs get progressively worse as we age into them.

Fearing our voice renders us incapable of understanding our mind. Without an understanding of our mind, we can’t expect to be of any use to another person. The less we understand how our mind operates and the less willing we are to engage in solitude, the less we will know who we are, what we are made of, and the world we inhabit. Solitude is maligned by some as isolated and reclusive, but this practice leads to a brighter discovery of the world. If you cannot be alone with your thoughts, then you cannot properly adhere to the path that is a requirement of reading well. Your relationship to everything taking place outside of your inner being becomes too much of a deterrent to reveal a life of improvement.

Unfortunately, our current culture has reduced this practice to just the occasional, as needed approach. This is problematic because we see less people participating in real thinking through reading and prefer the fast-paced, bloody 24-hour news cycle. Again, I will reference this, “reading as an implicit discipline.” It is about discipline and our willingness for the slow, methodical approach to what is important. The fast, dopamine-laced approach wins our brain time and time again.

Another way we lack discipline is in the stories we tell ourselves. The psychotherapist and author, Lori Gottlieb, describes this in her TED talk as, “the way we narrate our lives, shapes what they become.”11 We narrate our lives by how we communicate with ourselves. One question is, how complete is our information (or, what are we allowing to be withheld from ourselves)? A second question is, are we giving ourselves adequate distraction-free time to understand the entire story? And a third question, and perhaps the most important, are we willing to do what is necessary to understand the complete version of our story?

These questions do not evade the act of reading. Reading is necessary to understand ourselves and, in turn, other people. And without adequate time of solitude, we cannot possibly hope to understand why we tell ourselves the stories that we do. Reading poetry is a wonderful tool in learning how to communicate with ourselves, as Bloom shares.

Reading to Know More People

Books not only help us learn how and why to think and challenge our own mind, but they help us understand people. As Bloom wrote, “you can know, intimately, only a very few people and perhaps you never know them at all.” People are not shy of hiding who they really are, what they really think, and why they really believe what they do. Perhaps they don’t even know. Or, maybe they believe in their own false narratives that aren’t serving them. We all have these narratives.

Writers write to think, and thinking is, if nothing else, an act of discovery. Great novels and plays have something in common: their literary characters are rich and they grow through discovery of their own being. They can also despair into their own hatred. Both sides form a basis of reading as it helps to understand how circumstance leads to the road taken. Cormac McCarthy, who sadly passed away last week, penned this beautiful dialogue between a man and his son in his haunting novel, The Road:12

--You have to carry the fire.
--I don’t know how to.
--Yes you do.
--Is it real? The fire?
--Yes it is.
--Where is it? I don’t know where it is.
--Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.

The Road is the horrific story of a dystopian world full of cannibal bandits destroying all that is sacred. The story revolves around the man and his son’s journey through this world. This is the typical profound darkness and beauty of McCarthy’s writing. The fire is a symbol for humanity. While I could go on for paragraphs about “the fire,” this is about the boy’s discovery of who he is and the kind of person he is becoming in an ugly world. As beautifully orchestrated as the plot is, it’s the character development that makes this novel what it is.

Reading for plot, especially when reading fiction, can be entertaining, but reading to understand the people inside and what they are about is a vastly more interesting exercise. We come to understand how we fit into this world. I believe it also helps us to have richer relationships when we do step out of solitude and understand the person sitting next to or across from us.

Bloom believed that Shakespeare’s plays and Cervantes’ Don Quixote were the supreme entities in character formation and how we understand people.

Reading Against Time

Like me, you have probably heard the same excuses against reading. “I don’t have enough time,” or, “it’s just so boring.” If you are one to embody such excuses, then I question whether you have actually tried. The reason you think it’s boring is because it’s challenging your brain in a way that hasn’t been challenged. The reason you don’t have time is because you make no effort. Every human has the same 24-hour period to work with. And yet there are people who find a way to read more than one hundred books per year despite having a job, spouse, and kids. The problem isn’t that there is no time. The problem is we waste it frivolously and it’s easier to make the excuse of time than it is to swallow our ego and accept that we just don’t care enough.

The word leisure originated from the Latin word schola, which means school. In Ancient Greece, this did not literally mean attending school, not as we think of it today anyway. In those days they used it to contemplate a higher purpose of the mind. They would spend time in activities like philosophical conversation, reading, playing sports, playing music, and creating art.1314 Time permitted away from work was not used to crack a beer and watch the game on Sunday. I’m not suggesting you can’t watch the game, but it’s rarely just one game. It is the beginning of a lifestyle that turns into mindless negligence as we become more deeply entrenched.

Seneca, the Stoic philosopher spent much of his leisure time writing letters. One such letter is an essay titled “On the Shortness of Life,”15 in which Seneca writes, "No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly… You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that." There is urgency here. We are guaranteed nothing. As the clock ticks, we have the option and ability to put our mind and time to better use. We see our negligence as pleasure, but we are left with nothing to show for it. Real pleasure exists in the difficult. We are better for destroying our ignorance at home.

Robert Gottlieb was a passionate reader. As an editor, he made reading his life. But he disliked the difficulty of writing despite having written eight books. He wrote this about his reluctance, “The most horrible part was an almost unyielding resistance to sitting down at my typewriter—I could spend days avoiding it, while beating myself up for my recalcitrance. My only satisfaction was in having completed a difficult job.” Difficulty makes the work worthy of our time. Whether it’s reading or writing. Exercise or maintaining proper diet. Meditating or journaling. It is sober discipline. And it is necessary to live a fulfilling life.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to comment below.

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