Reading is one of my favorite activities. Reading fiction can be a way to relax as well as leave our concerns behind and step into someone else’s world. Non-fiction books and essays can inform, challenge, and inspire us. Reading, especially in book-length and depth, expands our vocabulary and gives us an opportunity to perceive the mind being itself, as knowing itself. We read and, as with imaginative, creative, or critical thinking, experience the power within us to know, visualize and illuminate the world from the inside out.
Sometimes, we can’t discern what we think or feel until we hear or read someone else’s words and then feel a kinship or opposition. We read a paragraph and it’s like suddenly discovering a great canyon in the ground never seen before or recognizing, as if for the first time, how the earth floats in the infinite ocean called sky. In the beauty of another’s speech our own becomes known and beautiful. We find communion.
What do we do when we read to turn marks on a page into insights? How do we step out of ourselves, so we hear another? How can we read so we’re not simply working to confirm what we already believe but instead deepen both our understanding and our lives? How do we get ourselves in a similar mindset as the author, so we hear them in a kindred way as they listened for us?
In the Summer, 2021 issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review there’s a review written by Matthew Abrahams of professor and journalist George Saunder’s book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. Saunders wrote: “To study the way we read is to study how the mind works… the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world…” In this I realized a kindred longing, to study how I read as a practice in studying myself. If I could read words and notice when my attention drifted or sank into an ocean of ruminations, depths normally hidden might be revealed.
Saunders said, “each time a writer returns to the story, it is as a different version of themselves.” That is both the excitement and challenge of re-writing. Likewise, each time we re-read a paragraph, it is as a different reader. We see more or see differently. We are more open to others and treat differences as essential nutrients in growing ourselves.
When we are about to read, we can pause, take a few breaths, and clear space in our minds for something new to enter. We can keep a pen and paper next to us, so we can converse with what we hear. We can repeat to ourselves each word we read, especially words that stand out or confuse us, and notice what arises inside us, what echoes in our breath, our thoughts, and our feelings.
We can ask why the author said what they did. What evidence or reasons did they have? What are the implications of their theory or point of view?
I was recently re-reading historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The book was published in 2017 to help us save our nation from the tyranny Trump was/is trying to impose on us. In Snyder’s words we find not only a social and political message, about fighting tyranny and preserving a civil society, but a psychological one about strengthening ourselves.
In lesson ten, Snyder tells us, “Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power…” If we abandon facts and lie prolifically, we give up on caring for anyone but ourselves. The liar, in effect, takes away the voice of others. The liar attempts to replace our perceptions with their lies, our ability to question with their facility with fabrication.
To lie like DT does is also an effort to hide the present, deny what it is, and replace it with a vision of the future the liar craves and is attempting to fashion. In lesson four, Snyder tells us to, “Take responsibility for the face of the world…. Notice the swastikas and other signs of hate.” Do not gloss over, do not ignore.
When we bring our focus to what’s real in the present, we come alive to the only time we can discern what’s truthful and what’s propaganda. We strengthen our ability to look and see, to read what’s in front of us and remember it. We are more mindful, more able to feel the meaning of what is presented to us instead of creating a wall around ourselves built of expectations and beliefs. We don’t mythologize the past, limit the possibilities of the future, nor lose contact with the actual text or the problems that confront us.
Snyder also mirrors Saunders directly. In lesson nine he writes about the necessity to read books (especially about history), not just online sources and social or commercial media that pushes stock phrases and ways of thinking with limited depth. “Think of your own way of speaking… Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet.”
Why fill our mouths with words that blind us to our reality, or let our minds be possessed by commercial interests? Instead, we can develop a storehouse of concepts that enable us to map, describe, and respond fluidly to life with independence and clarity.
Philosopher, psychologist, and cultural historian Jean Huston made a similar point in a workshop I once took with her. She told us immersing ourselves in poetry makes beauty readily available, and more likely to percolate through the unconscious and emerge in our thinking, speaking, and writing. We then develop a familiarity with metaphor and a facility with language that links us deeply to our world.
So, let’s read. Bring out the books. Read for pleasure as well as for strengthening our ability to discern in our words a communion of the truth of ourselves with the reality of others.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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