Reading Makes a Promise
On book culture, the inefficiency of experience, and why we read.
In the old days on Book Row in Manhattan, book hunting was a dusty pursuit: all the wares were secondhand. Nowadays, even The Strand, the sole survivor of the district’s glory days, turns a bright face of new releases to much of its traffic (for which I, as a fledgling author, can be nothing but grateful), but back then, the whole neighborhood was infested with old volumes, and the emporiums that traded in them were in a dotage of their own. As Murray Dauber put it in the obituary for his store, Dauber & Pine, that ran in the New York Times in May of 1983, the clientele that had supported it was disappearing, a victim of the urban space-time-money continuum on which New York has always plotted its present as it dispenses with its past. “They don’t have the space anymore to collect all kinds of books,” Dauber said. ‘There used to be lots of apartments around here with 5,000 or 10,000 books. None of the young people have that kind of space.” [see Note 1] Or time, he might have added; but let’s not rush things.
The idea that one might mine wisdom or consolation from the mother lode of volumes that ran in a seam along Fourth Avenue — and perhaps thereby uncover one’s life — was a notion that ran back to Gutenberg and beyond; it was the culmination of the millennium of book culture that began around the year 1000. The story of its rise and decline is fodder for another chapter, but fear that the civilization of reading — of book-nourished privacy and public life — was coming to an end may have been more than a specter to Mr. Dauber and his colleagues, even if the addictive screens that were to put a period on the end of print’s long sentence had not yet come into sharp focus. In any case, whether or not the veteran booksellers understood the larger implications, they mourned the curtailing of their livelihoods in the shadow of their own mortality.
Volumes crouch in corners, secrete themselves along the shelves, lie in wait in libraries public or personal until we’re ready for their wisdom, then spring their wits upon us.
Book hunting, of course, is not so dusty now. It is one of the ironies of the digital age, in fact, that the business of books led the way, via Amazon, into the robotic warehouses of frictionless e-commerce — everything available all the time and just a click away — and marked out the first paths toward the surveillance future we increasingly inhabit at the beck and call and beck again of occult algorithms predicting our longings with inscrutable orthodoxy. Yet for all the ease of search box convenience and cardboard carton delivery, these is something missing. For generations, inveterate browsers have known that books discover us as much as we discover them. Volumes crouch in corners, secrete themselves along the shelves, lie in wait in libraries public or personal until we’re ready for their wisdom, then spring their wits upon us. Worthy books have a way of coming to hand when we’re ripe for them. Such fortune is the browser’s faith, and solace, the first intuition of the vocation. But it’s the first rule of e-commerce that discovery be made efficient (this was also, of course, the guiding principle of mass retailing and big-box stores, but those now quaint manifestations of directed shopping lacked the ruthless enforcement of algorithmic certitude). Not only dust but serendipity be damned! [see Note 2]
But discovery made efficient is not discovery at all. The very qualities a dusty old bookstore promoted — ”the miscellaneous learning of the bookstore,” Edmund Wilson invoked in To the Finland Station, “unorganized by any larger purpose, the undisciplined undirected curiosity of the indolent lover of reading” — were escapes from the affronts of the efficiency outside it, the pigeonholes of the projected futures society might have in store. (And if the future seemed projected then, it’s positively programmed now: “Make Google do it!”) Call it procrastination or creativity, browsing is always filled with promise, as, of course, is reading. The first indulges our instincts and the second informs our attention, shaping its quality and thereby describing our presence in the world. In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu writes: “As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”
And William James himself wrote this:
Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground — intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.
“Only those items which I notice shape my mind.” Which means that what we choose to notice may be the most important continuous decision-making we do, whether we are aware of the choices or not. Yet we live in an age of news feeds, of often benign but all-too-often perniciously targeted information in which indiscriminateness is disguised as its opposite, a kind of collectively individualized experience in which we are habituated not to noticing but to consuming. It is not our attention that is served, but rather, our distraction, and the commercial interests of others.
Last year, the novelist Joshua Cohen published a book of essays called Attention: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction. Reviewing it for the Wall Street Journal, Zachary Fine spoke about the pitfalls of our newsfeed world as he parsed Cohen’s meaning:
What does it mean, Mr. Cohen wonders, to live online, in a “land” without a common culture — that’s inimical to a common culture — where facticity is under siege, where identities are worn and shorn and shed like clothing. Images of mass death, reports on the salubrity of butter, sound bites of the swallow’s birdsong: “We click away,” [Cohen writes], “but then we return, but then we click away again.” Distractions, expertly engineered, squeeze our attentions for profit all day, and then we return home tired, fumble through the dark and hunger for our screens again — another distraction in this unending, grim regress.
“To live in America today,” Mr. Cohen writes, “is to sit slackjawed at a helpless recline, stuck between the external forces that seek to disempower and control us, and our own internal drives to preserve, protect, and defend our hearts and minds.”
Space for our hearts and minds — space for both to breathe, and stretch, and grow — is something reading creates. That sense of agency that reading gives us, that we also get from browsing in a bookstore and coming upon something we didn’t know we wanted but that speaks to us with urgency and charm, serves our pleasure as individual readers, but also suggests the dangerous constrictions of the technological imperatives to which we’ve surrendered so much of our attention.
We live in an age of algorithms, in which all of human experience is subject to rules of engineering efficiency. That’s marvelous, and even liberating, in many ways. But the most important experiences in life are not efficient. Infancy isn’t efficient, nor is growing up. Education is not efficient, and is less and less education in its true sense the more it pretends to be efficient. Raising children isn’t efficient. Taking care of aging parents isn’t efficient. Falling in love isn’t efficient, and falling out of love is even less so. In fact, thinking is seldom efficient, nor are the revelations we come to about ourselves and the world by living, pondering, and worrying until we learn to be comfortable in our own skin.
Reading of any kind helps us with the living, pondering, and worrying that shapes us, not so much by delivering instructions as by allowing us the space to discover inspirations and develop our intuitions — space in which we can learn to talk to ourselves more thoughtfully than the press of events usually allows. “Becoming is a secret process,” Heraclitus wrote more than 2500 years ago, as noted by Guy Davenport in his book of translations of that ancient philosopher. It is, in fact, the age of the book made second nature that space in which our hearts and minds take shape. It was reading that created what we think of now as the inner life, the secret process of becoming ourselves. [See Note 3]
Reading, of course, has lost its vogue. So has thinking. “We seem somehow bored with thinking. We want to instantly know,” said Maria Popova in an On Being podcast with Krista Tippett.
Both reading and thinking — and we can throw in learning — are covered with dust in the showroom of modern appliances, which gleam with the inexorable unambiguity of engineering positivism, the hardwired mindlessness of neurological fundamentalism, and the triumphant marketing of economic simplemindedness as profundity rather than reductionism (economics, as Rory Sutherland once teased it, being “the study of human motivation with all the interesting variables set to zero”). T. S. Eliot [see Note 4] was right when he wrote so presciently in the 1940s about the increasing provincialism of the modern mindset, a provincialism of time that has only been exacerbated by the infectious distractions of clickable “content” in the never-ending present of our digital timelines and — as brilliantly detailed and assessed in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism — by the insidious expropriation of the future tense, through the commodification of our current and predicted behaviors, pioneered by Google and promulgated by Facebook and others clearing the path, so they would like to convince us, for the inevitable course of technological progress.
“The bankers may not know it, but the future will need the past. It will need marble floors and the sweet taste of my gypsy cakes.”
Zuboff’s analysis of the extraction of data from our behavior, and the corollary abstraction of subjectivity from experience — she writes tellingly of Google’s coordination of technological, political, legal, and public relations agendas to establish its “prerogative to empty every place of the subjective meanings that unite the human beings that gather there” — is impressive and extensive, lucid in both explication and argument (and, I might add, poised in its prose and a pleasure to read). The complex map of technology, history, economics, and culture she draws is illuminated with human emotions eloquently captured, like those of Fito Montes, proprietor of a venerable, financially imperiled Barcelona bakery, who reflects: “The bankers may not know it, but the future will need the past. It will need marble floors and the sweet taste of my gypsy cakes. They treat us like figures in a ledger, like they are reading the number of casualties in a plane crash. They believe the future belongs only to them.” And Zuboff amplifies his reflections: “For Fito Montes, his family’s right to anticipate the future as their home demanded continuity for some things that are elusive, beautiful, surprising, mysterious, inexpressible, and immaterial but without which, they all agreed, life would be mechanical and soulless.”
What data discredits — language, learning, contemplation, time — books memorialize. And a bookstore like The Strand, in the wayworn warrens of my nostalgia, yes, but even in the bright and bustling holiday activity of the December afternoon that sparked these ruminations, is, deep in its stacks, a museum of subjective meanings, gleaned through the authors’ application of time and awaiting the time of readers to uncover them in a new search for knowledge, or comfort, or inspiration.
“And that much never can be obsolete,” Philip Larkin wrote of a lonely English church surrounded by a graveyard,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious
And gravitating with it to this ground
Which he once heard was proper to grow wise in
If only that so many dead lie round.
In the future being made for us, will there be a Balzac of the bookish life who will cherish illusions as lost as these?
[Note 1] As if to put a distant exclamation point on this remembered story, the front page of the New York Daily News, on the day I write — March 12, 2019 — has this headline and lead: “BOOK WORMS — Bldg. owners seek to boot tenant with large library, claim it’s a fire hazard.” Old news.
[Note 2] The word “serendipity” was coined, in a letter, by Horace Walpole, who formed it from the title of the fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip” (Serendip being a former name of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka), the heroes of which “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” I know this etymology, and much else, thanks the intellectual exuberance of Robert K. Merton’s book, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.
[Note 3] More to on this theme here: Silent Reading Finds a Voice.
[Note 4] For the full Eliot quotation, see section 1 of Used Books.
