Falling for words

Depending on your initial point of departure, the price of a ‘round the world’ airplane ticket can vary greatly: begin from one of the typical Western cities and it will be costly, but start from somewhere usually seen as a ‘destination’ and it can be relatively cheap. In 2003, when we were returning to Canada from Vanuatu, my mother discovered—astoundingly—that the price of such a ticket, which afforded the possibility of stopping in 15 different cities of one’s choosing, was only ~1.5x more expensive than a one-way ticket back home. And so, understandably, we took the scenic route.

Our trip would begin with learning (but never actually learning) to surf in Fiji; to trekking up to Everest basecamp, wearing my indoor soccer shoes the entire way; then renting gear out of a van in the parking lot and hiking up to ski down one of the very few ski hills in Morocco, and all of Africa; and finally, joining the long line of tourists puckering up to take our turn at hanging upside down to kiss the Blarney stone. But most of all, that trip around the world reminds me of books, and of the many libraries and bookshops in which I spent so much of my time.

You see, when we landed in Auckland, I wanted to go the library, and once there, could hardly be persuaded to leave. I then repeated this in Christchurch, followed by Wellington, and finally in Wanaka, only leaving the latter’s comfortable reading room to join my mother and sister in checking out the famous maze at ‘Puzzling World’. My mother remonstrated, “the glaciers, the mountains, the lakes—there’s so much amazing beauty here, won’t you please join us on today’s hike?”[1] But after a year of living in a small village on a small island, nothing seemed so amazingly beautiful to me as building full of books. And so that’s where I stayed, reading my way through the Darren Shan books, a young-adult series chronicling the adventures of a teen vampire.[2]

When we got to the UK and Ireland, if the local library didn’t have the newest book, I’d beg my mom for 12 pounds, go to the book shop, and buy #9 in the series; then I’d go back to the hostel, read it all day, careful to hardly open the book so as to leave the spine unbent; then the next morning I’d return to the same shop with my receipt and a still crisp book—“I’m sorry I was here yesterday and I bought #9, but I meant to buy #10, can I please exchange this?” My mother, annoyed at my excessive bookishness, warned me that when I was older I’d look back on this trip and regret this behaviour, but I wonder if she would have been even more alarmed then to know I’d eventually grow into an adult with no such regret.[3]

I love reading. I always have. Why? One way to give an answer would be narrowly personal and idiosyncratic: i.e., that from a young age, for myriad reasons, I learned to I attach my sense of self-esteem to my reading and writing, and what started with external praise from parents and teachers then transformed into an inner source of motivation,[4] resulting in an adult who has a custom ‘book-pouch’ sewn into each of his jackets, for whom to be found without a pen in his pocket is a form of failure that opens himself up to severe self-sanction, and who has gladly (but foolishly) traded all hope of any semblance of financial security for the freedom to read and write as he wishes.

But having already indulged in descriptive memoir enough for now, in this essay I want to explore a wider explanation, and unfold a more substantive justification, for the love of reading. Or, to once again put it ‘as plainly and provocatively as possible’, having already defended tennis as the best sport, I now turn to what makes reading (and writing) the best form of art. As was the case with tennis, we are again in need of some kind of background standard that can serve as a working definition for art itself, so as to measure its different forms against this yardstick.

Without at all pretending that this is absolutely definitive, I offer the following conception: all art, at its very best, is the expression of human creativity and freedom, and an attempt to capture and communicate some aspect of what it means to be the kind of creatures that we are. To the extent that such a skeletal starting-point requires further fleshing-out, I will provide this below, through the different parts of my essay’s body.   

What is reading?

Years ago, I remember seeing a popular poster that offered a memorable answer: “reading is staring at slices of dead trees marked with symbols and vividly hallucinating for hours”. The joke, of course, is how this description so effectively denaturalizes something as commonplace as reading, and gets us to confront its sheer strangeness. But, I think, the joke doesn’t go far enough, and what reading both entails and makes possible seem to me to be even stranger still. In this essay I will present four distinct but interrelated elements that combine to make reading all that it is.

First, reading is a solitary yet social mind-meld that allows us to overcome both time and space, effectively slipping into the mind of another, and establishing an active relationship of co-interpretation. Second, reading often seems, somewhat paradoxically, to be a process not only of self-discovery (the unearthing of that which was always dormant inside oneself), but also of self-creation (the forging of something wholly new). Third, although reading is directed at a set of symbols that represent often abstract concepts and categories of the mind, the practice of reading ultimately enables one to identify and appreciate the contingent and quotidian dimensions of life, thereby enriching one’s representation of reality. Finally, fourth, reading is, perhaps most of all, the practice of paying attention, and in the current social media climate, where powerful forces have gathered and now grapple to grab every waking moment of our attention so as to monetize our mindlessness, reading has become nothing less than a radical form of rebellion against these forces, and a self-assertion of one’s own autonomy.   

Reading, truly, is absurd. But to be human is to be awash in absurdity. And so reading and writing, together, constitute the most distinctively human art form, best capturing how we come to relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world through collective acts of self-interpretation and narration.

Active co-interpretation

Let’s very quickly compare literature[5] to the other art forms: music, movies, and ‘fine art’ (here I have in mind mainly painting, sculpture, photography). Literature immediately stands out as demanding the most active form of engagement from its participants. Perhaps some of you are already bristling, and of course it’s possible to actively engage in interpreting music, movies, or paintings while more passively imbibing literature. But also: c’mon, you know what I mean. Put the average six-year old in a room with all the relevant materials, and they’ll dance and sing and watch Disney while finger painting, likely ignoring the books; whereas they’ll come to the others naturally, reading must initially be foisted upon them.[6]

And not to pick on children, it’s not at all surprising, really, that all of us are so immediately seized by song and symphony, pulled into paintings, and moved by movies, but recoil from reading. Literature, amongst these arts, is the one that is not like the others: you have to sit, be still, quiet, and think, entering into an active relationship of co-interpretation. Granting that all art exists along sliding scales of ‘passive participation to active engagement’ or ‘emotional enjoyment to intellectual interpretation’, my only claim is that literature most holds the possibility of being at the ‘higher’ end. After all, note that even when we want to explain the deeper meaning behind a song, painting, or movie, what do we do?: we write about it. 

Books furnish the mind, so they say. At the very least, reading other’s stories allow us to furnish the saloon of our minds with their furniture, as we adopt and regurgitate their opinions. And this is an important and inevitable aspect of slipping into another’s mind and seeing things as they do. But fundamentally, reading is a relationship of co-interpretation: the writing is the author’s offer of interpretation(s), and the act of one’s reading it completes the relation of co-interpretation. More than other art forms, when reading literature, part of the process always involves thinking ‘is this a compelling way to analyze things? Is it coherent and convincing?’ When one writes, one invites this kind of interpretation, and opens oneself up to this dimension of judgement. For Walter Benjamin, “it is not private thinking but…the art of thinking in other people’s heads that is decisive.”

Regarding the ‘solitary-sociality’ of reading, consider how intimate and vast this co-interpretive mind-meld can quickly become. For instance, last week I was reading Michael Oakeshott’s essay on Hobbes’s view of human pride, in which Oakeshott distinguishes Hobbes from Augustine on this matter, while also contrasting his own interpretation from that of Leo Strauss. So when I read this essay, I’m not only holding Oakeshott’s view in my mind (or rather, my interpretation of his view) as well as his interpretation of each of these writers, but I’m also holding my own interpretation of each of these writers, or even my interpretation of their own interpretations of each other. Furthermore, I’m also thinking of the so-called ‘Fall’ of Adam and Eve in the Torah, and at the same time asking myself what Marilynne Robinson’s new book, Reading Genesis, might add to this debate. Taken together, these writings stretch back thousands of years ago, up until as recently as March 12, 2024. [7] My claim with this example and all its many varying vector points is not that I am doing something unique, but rather that this is part of what is so special about reading: in such a moment, multiple minds stretching across hundreds or even thousands of years, all come together, inside your head. As I said, the seemingly ‘simple’ act of reading can quickly become deliciously complex.[8]  

Books are lenses: spectacles shaped by script, through which we may perspicaciously peer out at our world. The reason books are so important, then, is because such lenses are inescapable; there is no direct conduit to the matter of the world—everything must always be interpreted. Everyone interprets the world through a set of lenses, whether they realize it or not. Another way to put this is to say that humans are ‘mediate’ beings; we do not simply exist immediately in our times and places, or even within our bodies. Rather, our temporal and spatial embodiment is mediated through our senses, our passions, our imagination, and our language.[9] Human embodiment is always a problem—one which we are continually called upon to resolve for ourselves. And one of the chief forms through which we attempt and achieve this reconciliation with ourselves is through art.[10] And the written word, I argue, is our greatest ally in this historical human endeavour.

When I read the greats, I do so because I want Machiavelli and Beauvoir or Proust and Morrison to be part of my spectacles, helping me discern, identify, and deduce. Especially serious readers will come to exist between two communities: the real people they interact with each day, and the imaginary, distant, and dead people they spend their time with through books. In some ways, this latter group may come to seem more real than the former. (As an adult, I have spent more time with Rousseau, than with my father; I’ve taken hours, days, and weeks away from my friends, and given it to my books.) Reading as co-interpretation is to invite these authors into one’s mind, as one steps into theirs. So does reading also increase one’s capacity for empathy? Well, it depends—it’s complicated

Some will say yes, imaginatively seeing the world through another’s eyes, from their perspective, allows us to not only give it intellectual consideration, but also accord it emotional worth. It’s hard to care about another’s position if you don’t understand them, and it’s difficult to understand them if you haven’t seen things as they do. The practice of reading, which exercises our empathetic muscles, bridges this important divide, allowing us to return to the world more capable of consideration for others.

Others, perhaps most famously Rousseau, complicate this idea. Rousseau worried that literature actually refashions and redirects our empathy in both predictable and problematic directions, because of the kinds of people who are most able to tell their stories, and the kinds of stories that are then most widely read and thought about. For instance, he noticed Parisians openly weeping in the opera for the heartbreak of some fictional princess, and then coldly stepping over the pauper as they left the theatre. If empathy is a muscle, then maybe by exercising it through reading, we’re actually left weaker when we return to the world; or worse, perhaps literature (with its usual characters and stories) conditions us to count certain people as worthy of empathy, while rendering others essentially invisible. Hence why it’s so important to not only read widely, but to ensure that many different types of people have the chance to tell their stories, and have them read.

This is also why it is so important to be aware of the the practice of reading as an active relationship of co-interpretation, because when we read, we’re not only being shown what to think about, but also how to think, and feel. As we underline, circle, and mark in our marginalia, we discourse with both the dead and distant, and they then leave their own marks upon our minds.[11] And depending on the fame of the author and the spread of the story, this can have long-lasting and far-reaching implications. For what lasts longer than words wrought into narrative? As Athens’s Acropolis crumbles, Plato’s philosophical Kallipolis persists; with not but shards of pottery from the Homeric era, the Iliad and Odyssey remain ever recited and retranslated. Gerald Murnane wrote, “I judge the worth of a book according to the length of time during which the book stays in my mind.” The ‘classics’ are those works that are eternally embedded in our collective psyches, their authors consecrated within our craniums as constant co-interpreters. In doing so, and to quote Murnane again, “I’ve adapted a fictional text for the best of all purposes: to enrich an actual life.”

Self-discovery/creation

Reading and writing, eventually, pushes and pulls one ever deeper into oneself, and ultimately becomes the articulation of one’s self to oneself. That may sound exceedingly obfuscating, but we’ve all had this experience: we’re reading a book, and suddenly we feel as if the author has just articulated an aspect of our emotional landscape that we had always somehow felt or intuited, but never had the words for, until that moment. This is reading as self-discovery. And if anyone has ever kept a journal for any length of time, then you know that once you start writing about your own life, jotting down your memories leads to noting insights, which leads to formulating ideas that you never would have landed upon if you hadn’t started writing in the first place. This is writing as self-creation. In both cases, the self-discoveries/creations then become pieces of you, which you continue to shape and share.

As humans, we are fundamentally linguistic animals. It is language that allows us to follow the homo with sapiens.[12] Words enable us to truly think. It is of course possible to feel emotions without language, but we nonetheless yearn to articulate any and all of our feelings. Notice how the common refrains, ‘I don’t even have the words for how I felt’, or ‘It was an indescribable feeling’ are themselves ways of describing a kind of feeling; in such attempts to define through non-definition, we articulate the in-articulable abyss by assigning it a boundary.  

Kafka wrote, “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us… the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves… A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside of us”.[13] And Augustine, who arguably wrote the first ever autobiography, spends a lot of space discussing books: “These books served to remind me to return to my own self” and through them “I entered into the depths of my soul”. Indeed, in the climactic scene of his Confessions, Augustine is in a garden suffering existential despair, when he hears what he takes to be the voice of God speaking through a child, yelling ‘Take it and read it, take it and read it’, whereupon Augustine turns to his book for solace (Paul’s Epistles), and therein reads the words that lead to the internal conversion that transformed him for the rest of his life.[14] (Notice how this nicely reflects the story of Adam and Eve: despair in a garden, divine intervention, and the establishment of a further mediated existence with the world, which promises eventual reconciliation.) Kafka’s and Augustine’s sentiments both perfectly capture literature’s capacities of self-discovery and self-creation.

All this is unsurprising—of course writers think books are awesome.[15] Well in that case, consider my mother: she loves photographs, and is obsessed with cataloguing all life’s moments in her ever-growing collection of photo-albums, which stretches back to the lives of her grandparents. (She’s always said that if the house were afire, it is those albums she would choose to save, and indeed she got to prove this last summer, when Wasa was put on evacuation alert due to encroaching forest fires.) However, I recently got even my photo-philic mother to admit that, if possible, she would trade all the photos of her long dead mother in exchange for any detailed diaries and letters she may have wrote. Alas, my grandmother never left behind any such writings; but if she had, they would be an invaluable and incomparable means into the intimate depths of her mind, which is now forever gone from the world. Or similarly, take my former partner Hanna, who recently reached out to say hello after coming across a box of our letters. Our camera roll may take us back to a certain place and time, but our letters will place us right back into a particular frame of mind. And in this way, letters are supremely special—for all of us.

When I write a letter (or in my journal), it often happens that, in recounting some past event from my life, I begin, through my writing, to discover thoughts and feelings about that event that I know for a fact I did not think or feel at the time. But after discovering them through writing, they come to constitute how I remember that event itself. Whatever the actual feelings and thoughts I had at the time, they are essentially gone—ever lost into the evanescent ether. I will never think or feel them again; my grandchildren, or whoever else, will never encounter them and reflect upon them. In this way, the words become the reality.

This claim may bother some, such is our reductive inclination to bias actions over words. ‘Actions speak louder than words’, as every child knows. As if it were not words themselves that even give the conceivability of normative standing to actions: without words, and the conceptual framing they make possible, actions are merely movements, and thus meaningless. Actions are invested with meaning through words. Not for nothing is the very first act God performs a speech-act: “Let there be light”. It is by the light of words that we may see our world, and make it meaningful.

If reading, and especially writing, push one ever deeper into oneself, it is therefore unsurprising that many of the most memorable, insightful, and famous quotes we have from different writers—from Beauvoir to van Gogh, or Einstein to M.L.K—come from their journals and their letters. To sit down and write in this way, is to enter into a process of self-exploration. Just sit down with a pen and paper and allow yourself to enter into that space—you’ll likely return having encountered something you didn’t even know was there to discover.

It is thus a true shame that letter writing has become a dying form of communication. You may think that surely a video call is better than a letter—how can an envelope outdo an instant message, when it comes to keeping in touch with loved ones? Because when you sit down to write long-form, you tap into a distinct dimension of inter-communication. For instance, without another’s interjections, you are enabled to follow thoughts through more deeply than is possible through instantaneous communication; without another person’s presence, be it for better or worse, you are forced to fall back upon just yourself. The result is that you will end up disclosing aspects of yourself that would have otherwise never been divulged.[16]

For professional writers, not only does their writing bring about moments of discovery and creation for themselves, but even for their artificial creations: all authors strive to create characters that ‘become so real’ that it feels as if the author can then allow their characters to fulfill their own arcs. After these lively characters leap from the page to surprise even their creator, they then come to live alongside us, and I have friends who could tell me more about Harry Potter’s life than they can about mine. (I’m looking at you, Corissa and Caitlin).

The very best authors will eventually come to cultivate their own unique and personal relationship to language itself. This is why we can recognize a particular sentence as belonging to Hemingway rather than Joyce, to Woolf or to Wallace. And through their achievements—whether it be a memorable metaphor, apt analogy, quirky question, or pregnant phrase—they give us the gift of sharpening our sight through the donning of their new lens.[17] Similar to how the paintings of a Cézzane and a van Gogh seemingly usher in new ways of seeing, after reading the books of these literary optometrists, the world now looks different. 

Representation of Reality

I have established that everything must be interpreted, and I have argued that linguistic modes (and in particular, the written word), constitute the most special and paramount forms through which this interpretation occurs. We are the meaning-making mammals, and with our words, and the stories we subsequently spin, we are able to make sense of ourselves, others, and the world. We are thus first and foremost, self-interpreting and self-narrating creatures: to be human is to be telling oneself the story of oneself to oneself.

This view of a human is the touchstone that my entire argument rests upon, as well as its orienting lodestar. It is the core commitment that, until now, some of you may feel I’ve been concealing behind my back, where it supports the justificatory spine of my entire framework.[18] But it is my contention that words—not melodies, not murals, not movies—provide us the means of achieving the finest-grained distinctions and discernments of the human world. That all the paintings, pictures, or songs cannot as adequately capture 19^th century England or France like Dickens or Tolstoy; or as A House for Mr Biswas does for the Indo-Trinidadian experience; and as Beloved does for the horrors of American chattel slavery. 

In his magisterial Mimesis: the Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach escorts us with estimable erudition through his choice pieces in the progression of the Western canon: from Odysseus to Genesis to Shakespeare, and from Cervantes to Proust to Woolf.[19] It is of course a book that makes many arguments, but its chief contention is that the great works of literature both initially identify and then come to create new ways of understanding the world. In other words, literature can not only uniquely cue into emerging societal patterns and processes, but by giving those phenomena literary articulation, literary works contribute to making them not only widely noticeable, but also then capable of garnering and sustaining systemic analysis.

For instance, Auerbach points out how there is a dearth of subjectivity in Homer’s characters—how they feel, and how they think about how they feel, is never that important compared to the external events in which they find themselves embroiled. By the time we get to Proust, however, subjectivity is more or less the only game in town, and literature is concerned not only with establishing the narrative of how one thing led to another, but also entails introspection into the complicated emotional lives of characters.[20] Or how with Shakespeare, literature is concerned with the deeds of elites—kings and queens and their wars, the political machinations of aristocratic circles. But by the time we get to Woolf, it is conceivable that literature might be content to concern itself with the humble life of servant woman in the aftermath of her miscarriage—a story that may have been impossible for Shakespeare to even think of trying to tell. For Shakespeare, the proper field of ‘the tragic’ could have never been the everyday domestic sphere; if drama concerned itself with the workings of a marriage, it had to be one elevated to the corridors of political power, not set in some shack at the side of the road.[21]

The radical claim being made here is that these literary distinctions were not just due to the idiosyncratic quirks of their given authors, but were in fact the reflection of a host of complex (and often nebulous) socio-economic processes that came to be reified through their art. Crucially, Auerbach is also arguing that these literary distinctions change the way we are able to conceive of ourselves and of reality, as they open up new aspects of our emotional nature, and widen the host of perspectives that are considered to have something worth contributing to our understanding of the human condition.[22] According to the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, “everything in the world exists to end up in a book”. In putting the world into books, we change both the world and ourselves. The world is never what it once was, it is always changing in surprising ways—the same goes for us.   

To put this all more plainly and provocatively: a strand of literature, starting with Shakespeare and running through Proust, has come to help us better understand our own subjective natures; and another strand of literature, starting with the New Testament and running through Dickens, has moved us to more closely consider commoner’s perspectives—from the fisherman’s to the pauper’s—as worthy of attention (just like Rousseau wanted). In so doing, these literatures have radically refashioned and refined our sense of what counts as reality. And astoundingly, these literatures have had this effect on your own representation of reality regardless of whether or not you have actually ever read them yourself—they are, so to speak, ‘in the air you breath’, and you’ve imbibed their wisdom (to some meager extent) just by growing up when and where and how you’ve grown up.

This is not to say, of course, that actually reading them would not more deeply enrich one’s life and further substantiate one’s understanding of both humanity and of particular historical moments—it would! Reading these books would hone that keen writerly power of observation, which more than anything else might amount to the ability to see the myriad constructions lurking behind what others perceive to be natural and fixed.[23] Such is our bias for the now, and our susceptibility to the pall placed overtop our senses by the power of the present. ‘Be present’, we say, or ‘just be here, in the now’, as if such immediate being is either possible or appealing. The present, now, does not exist, at least not in the sense that we usually mean it. The present is nothing but the constantly created combination of both one’s understanding of the past and one’s conception of the future. The ‘present’ is thus an imaginative fiction we tell ourselves. And when we do so, we would do best to recruit the best writers and thinkers in this endeavour, lest our understanding of the present be filled by the anxieties of our age and the perversities of our period, which will inexorably seep into our open psyches like water to low ground. Without the wisdom whispered from these great books, which thankfully somehow makes its way through our (often rather thick) skulls, how many more of us would be little more than walking physical manifestations of our particular society’s shortcomings?

Great literature, then, is always already in your head, in some measure. And when you take the time to read these great books, the experience is not one of escapism (whereby you are transported to some distant elsewhere), but of introspection (whereby you are forced deeper into your own self). Or as Barnes puts it, when you read a great book, “There may be a superficial escape—into different countries, mores, speech patterns—but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains, and truths”. When all the words, words, words of Shakespeare throw us into the deep pits of our souls, it is to realize, through our plumbing, that it is only words, words, words—all the way down.

Ask a physician what they most wish people would learn about life, and they will tell you to never miss your annual checkup; ask a dentist, and they say make sure to clean your teeth, and don’t forget to floss. As for my mother and sister, both of whom are social workers, they’ll emphasize that you’ll need to be surrounded by a supportive community. All important things, to be sure. And so it’s not surprising that I often find myself thinking that most people’s problems could be solved by reading books. ‘With only the right books,’ I think to myself, ‘how petty their primary preoccupations would finally portray themselves; With only the appropriate authors, how aimless their aggravating anxieties would at last appear!’

To most people, the salvational role I accord to books will no doubt, at best, seem laughable; and at worst, it must appear to be a rationalization I desperately cling to so as to justify my decision to spend a dozen years in grad school. And both of these conclusions are not wholly unfair, nor far from the mark. But allow me a final defence! For if my fixation on books has lead me down a path that forecloses my accumulation of the levels of capital necessary to buy my future family a ‘comfortable’ life, then it has nonetheless given me something else that is perhaps even more valuable: a strong capacity to pay attention. 

Reading as Rebellion

I have compared literature to music, to movies, and to paintings. But we are not ‘Renaissance men’, nor are we living in Marx’s post-capitalist utopia, and so there is of course another lurking spectre that haunts our lives, and with which reading and writing must also be compared: scrolling. 

Be honest: during the time that you’ve been reading this essay, how many times have you stopped to check your phone, maybe to send a message, respond to a notification, or perhaps to simply scroll through some dank memes? But of course, most of us will be reading this essay on our phones in the first place, and so any distance between ‘reading essay’ and ‘using phone’ is completely collapsed. And so what even is a phone, these days, and what does it mean to scroll?

Once upon a time—‘back in my day’—a phone was an instrument for instantaneously communicating with others who were at some distance from oneself. Apparently, some people still use their phones for this purpose, but it is less common than it once was, and in some cases even frowned upon. If I ever mistakenly leave my phone off of its ‘silent-mode’, then when it rings with a message or a call, I am either alarmed or annoyed—depending on whether it is the former or the latter, respectively. If it is a message, I pick up my phone to look at it, and invariably I end up looking at all sorts of other things for the next half hour. If it is a call, then it is surely my mother or my wife, and I either ignore or answer—again, depending on whether it is the former or the latter.

But even in the case of just answering a call, to even touch my phone is to thereby tap open Pandora’s Box, and to let loose all of the evils that Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter (or whatever it’s now called)—and all the other god-like entities that compose our celestial corporate realm—have seen fit to plague humankind with. Ancient Greece produced Socrates, the gadfly who apparently threatened the stability of Athens; Late-capitalism now has Bezos buzzing around, and only time will tell if we will summon the collective courage needed to give him a cup of that same hemlock brew.

Bo Burnham, who first appeared as a precocious teenager singing crude rhymes and playing the piano on YouTube, has now grown from a comedian concerned primarily with penis puns into a kind of prescient public poet, especially when it comes to articulating the amorphous role of the internet in our lives, and in particular the lives of our children. Watch this wonderful clip, where he concisely captures what the internet has come to mean, and what a phone truly is.[24] Using the apt metaphor of colonization, Bo claims that whereas the powers of capital once colonized land, they have now turned to the colonization of the human mind—of attention. “They’re now trying to colonize every single minute of your life. Every single free moment you have is a moment you could be looking at your phone, and they could be gathering information to target ads at you. That’s what’s happening”. Just as the pre-Columbus natives could not at any point trust that the pathological powers gathering upon their shores would ever stop until all of the land was under their imperium, so too would we be remiss to think these titans of tech will stop until all of our attention is mastered and monetized.

And so what is a phone? A phone is your personal, 24/7 conduit connecting you to the most powerful companies the world has ever had the misfortune of playing host to; entities that are empowered by seemingly limitless amounts of capital, and apparently encumbered by absolutely no reservations about exploiting the drama of your neurochemical makeup and psychosocial systems in order to maximize shareholder’s profits. That is what we’re up against; and more to the point, what our children are up against. Billions of dollars in research and infrastructure, all designed to keep you scrolling.[25] Unsurprisingly, it’s working, and to devastating effects, the full consequences of which may take generations to reckon with.[26] Memes, music, masturbation, mass murder—whatever you want to see, and plenty you don’t, it’s all there to be scrolled.             

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not up on my high horse, holier than thou—I’m very much down in the technological trenches with you. I too flick my finger ever upwards, while spiralling ever downwards; currently unemployed, and abandoned by my wife for the past month, believe me when I say I’ve wasted entire days looking into the black mirror of this rectangle of regret. (But what is a day of drudgery for me, for many teens, has become just a day.) After reading or writing for a few hours, I feel sharp, alert–especially if I’ve entered that precious ‘flow’ state where time falls away. In contrast, after hours have gone by on my phone, I feel sluggish, lobotomized.

It’s not even as if it’s all bad either, and memes and scrolling can be so fun. If I’m being honest, I probably laugh the hardest these days from tweets, memes, and reels; harder than I laugh from books, television, or even my friends (unless of course my friends are sharing memes with me, the exchange of which has come to constitute my main mode of interacting with many of them). To be sure, the amount of comedic genius to be found in almost every comment section is simply baffling; that is, until one realizes that, coming with the commendation of anywhere around ‘23.8K likes’, each of those comments has been workshopped as much as any traditional standup routine.

And I’ll admit it: scrolling can sometimes be informative, and at their very best, memes and reels and twitter threads have the potential to play an educational, conscious-raising role. But these sources must be very purposefully curated and constantly protected, lest they become quickly choked by cacophonous content. Such pedagogical media is always contrary to the mechanisms of the algorithm, for the simple fact that such information will always eventually let you go and get on with your day (or as the case may be, get on with your night, and actually go to sleep.) Indeed, such information that actually benefits you once you’ve learned it will probably ultimately push you off of your phones, whether that be to tinker under the hood of your car, to make crafts with your kids, or to protest on the streets. Education enriches you, sends you out into the world; content captures you, keeps you locked on your phone. ‘Content’ is that which works to ensure that the key artifact that mediates your relationship with yourself, others, and the world remains your phone itself.

It’s quite depressing that, from its early promise of free-forming organizational systems, the contemporary internet has essentially been funnelled down into what it is today: a dozen dominant platforms, controlled by an even smaller cadre of corporate entities; and the only thing that seems to grow along with the profits they reap from this state of affairs, is our general sense of dissatisfaction with how it fails to serve our best interests—or indeed is often hostile to our health. Perhaps people have been spending too much time on their phones for well over a decade by now, but the problem seems to have recently ramped up to a whole new register. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram, today, have become almost unrecognizable compared with how they appeared just five years ago: namely, the plethora of ads that now greet us on our feeds.[27] Gone is Grandma leaving a private message on a public post; she’s been replaced with a beauty ad convincing your daughter she’s overweight (but of course she’s not), or by fake news convincing your neighbour democracy is collapsing (actually, this one may now have become true, but only because he first believed it). Social media all too often seems all too well designed to stoke the darker demons of our nature while suppressing our better angels, so that when we finally do manage to pull ourselves away from our phones, it is a haunted husk-like version of ourselves that confronts the world.

As Haidt points out, one of the potentially pernicious aspects of children’s online life is that most of the content they consume is created by other teens, all acting under the algorithmic anxiety to go viral, which most rewards outrage, meanness, or dazzling 30 second clips.[28] As such, the content they consume is often de-contextualized from any over-arching normative narrative or thought-provoking framework. At the risk of really sounding like the cranky old man I have not yet earned the right to be, what this means is that their primary and preferred mode of co-interpretation is happening without the guidance of compelling stories made by adults for children. In other words, they’re being cut off from the chance to benefit from establishing an active relationship of co-interpretation with literature made for them with an eye towards their moral development, and instead they’re being sacrificed on the altars of virality.    

This makes the situation of today’s young teens and their phones meaningfully distinct from the books I was, in some ways, so similarly obsessed with. Yes, my behaviour on my family’s ‘round the world’ trip closely reflects many of the bad habits of the typical phone obsessed teen: isolation, sedentariness, disinterest in spending time with family, and apathy towards learning about other cultures and places. But when I holed up in those libraries to spend the day reading Darren Shan vampire books, Kenneth Oppel’s books about bats, or Robert Ludlum’s spy novels, I was at least reading things that—besides providing some kind of attempt at a moral or theme to contextualize the drama—first and foremost taught me the practice of actively paying attention for prolonged amounts of time.

As I said above, attention is perhaps our most valuable gift, and our ability to autonomously direct it must be seen as one of our most cherished capacities. As a bookish teen, lurking in libraries and bookshops, I honed a practice that forever altered the trajectory of my adult life; I now worry that kids, tucked in their rooms and tied to their phones, are learning a different set of behaviours, but ones that could prove no less life-altering. And what makes the situation seem so tragic is the fundamental truth that the curious and energetic minds of children are always looking for something with which to fall in love: a book, a piano, a ball—and this is what we’ve given them. But being pessimistic does not come naturally me (I swear!), and so I leave off it for now.

Is it all doom and gloom? Never—even when it’s bleakest. There’s always room for hope and action, even with Pandora’s box in our pockets and palms. We can and should have phone free schools, and social media platforms that effectively prohibit youngsters from gaining accounts. As great as these would be, I also fear that for adults to limit children in these ways is to have already lost the war. Let me sketch a possible path… I believe humans are fundamentally driven by status, and the desire to occupy a favourable position in our social hierarchies. This applies to children no less than it does to adults, and this is the ultimate reason we all abuse social media so much—we can’t risk missing out, being left behind! Although this status structure currently supports social media, it could also come to cut against it. And so, if it were the case (and it is conceivable) that to go without a phone could become a signifier of one’s special status, then that could change things considerably. If this sounds crazy, consider that Kendrick Lamar’s “dumb phones”, which can only call, text, or be used to take notes, recently sold out in a single day. Think about that: one of the most popular rappers is making the rejection of smartphones and social media cool![29]

Or furthermore, reflect on how the fact that so many kids are always on their phones may actually present an opportunity for change rather than a sign of stagnation: style and trends often swing back in the opposite direction when they reach cultural ubiquity. In such moments, the especially cool people decide to distinguish themselves through rejecting what has become the status quo. I can conceivably imagine that, as the data continues to roll in about the damage phones wreak on kids, elites especially can be expected to begin to take steps to better protect their children. Even already we hear the rumours of how all the top execs of tech assiduously prohibit iPads from their kids, at the same time as their own lavish livelihoods depend on the fact that your child will go berserk without one!

If the cool, the rich, and the powerful amongst us come to more conspicuously reject their phones, then they could have the kind of necessary cultural cache to get the rest of us to follow suit.[30] This may all sound overly speculative and unduly sanguine, but when you step back and survey the situation with our screens, it truly feels like ‘something’s gotta give’. It may very well be the case that the fact that our phones are so bad is actually a reason to be hopeful: because nobody is truly enjoying our addiction, and we all—even our teenagers—wish we could get off of them, although nobody wants to be told to do so. (See: I told you I’m naturally an optimist!) Of course I’d like to think we’ll all just start reading more, storm the Googleplex like the Bastille it is, and re-invest in public libraries, but… I’m not that optimistic.  

Read(y) to Conclude

Reading is extremely powerful, and it always has been. Slaves could be heard singing or seen dancing, but to be caught reading… And since there have been books, there have been those who want to ban and burn them—i.e., those who fear their power. And it is always a great stain upon any community who does this. Most of the earth’s inhabitants would identify a particular book, or set of books, as amongst humankind’s most sacred possessions. This would be a sign of humanity’s deep wisdom, if only we did not so often attach to this worthy belief the desire to dominate and kill those who might disagree about which books those are; or even amongst those who do agree on the book, but then disagree about how to read it.[31]

So strange are the rhythms of human history, that just as I have railed against phones and scrolling in favour of books, others before me once railed against books and wished to limit literature to only a handful of handmade scrolls! And they may have been right to do so: it is possible to draw a line from Gutenburg’s Bible fresh off the printing press, through Martin Luther’s 95 Theses spiked to the door of All Saints’ Church, to the outbreak of the religious wars that ravaged and reshaped most of Europe for generations. Compared to those horrors, it may seem silly to complain that we feel over-satiated with passive entertainment to the point of collective depression. But that’s not what the problem with scrolling is just about, and there’s much more at stake: namely, the continued cultivation of our distinctively human capacity to self-narrativize through entering into active relationships of co-interpretation through various forms of art.[32] To bring Bo back “That’s what’s happening!”

Reading is an exercise of the capacities, and an appropriation of the arts, that are our birthright as humans; Reading is the searching and sharing of the endless boundaries and depths of the human story that we are all always telling to each other, together; Reading, finally, is the assertion of one’s right and capacity to autonomously direct one’s attention. And because we can self-direct our attention, me must. As Goethe writes in Faust, “presence is our duty, be it only a moment”. 

If someone tells me they read my essays, I know that they didn’t simply press play when doing the laundry or while stuck in traffic; they made the time to sit down, be still, and think with me. They chose to gift me their attention. And I try to earn that gift with these essays, and I take it rather seriously (probably more seriously than I ought to, all things considered). Every month, when I tell my wife what I’m going to write about, I’m usually met with, ‘nobody wants to read for fifteen minutes about your obsession with tennis or your crush on Timothée’; or this time: ‘they definitely don’t want to read ten thousand words about reading!’

And so every month, Breann is my first test: she kindly reads each essay, and if my sentences can carry her attention until the end, then I’m confident that I have something by which the only moderately-interested person may be yet (actively) engaged. To be sure, this month’s essay was a bit of a slog at points, and she admitted to skimming the longer footnotes; but she made it through, and gave me the somewhat weary smile that means it’s shareable! After all, love itself is ultimately a form of paying attention. Yes, this essay may be longer than it could otherwise be, but it is as long as it ought to be, and its length, after all, was part of the point. To all of you whose attention I still have, I know that you now fully understand all that I mean when I say: Thanks for reading.

---

[1] Honestly, I’d probably sooner read about a glacier than actually go look at one.

[2] You may be familiar with this book series through its offensively awful live-action adaptation with John C. Reilly, Cirque du Freak, The Vampire’s Assistant. The books were much better—absolutely enthralling, at least to my 13year-old mind. Whenever my eyes happen to fall upon the copies I still have on a bookshelf in my childhood bedroom, I’m overcome with the desire to reach out and touch them, like saying hello to an old friend.   

[3] For instance, in 2018, I took a four-day trip to visit my friend Josh, who lives in Seattle. He had to work for two days, but left me a detailed list of places to check out around the city—museums, fish markets, the usual. The first day I walked to three bookstores; the second day I spent the entire day reading Julian Barnes’s The Sense of An Ending. When Josh got home after the second day and slyly asked what I’d been up to, I told him I’d toured around town as he’d suggested, and it had indeed been quite nice, thank you. At which point he then revealed to me that his electronic door-lock system enabled him to know that I had in fact not left the house at all that day—busted.  

[4] Although even now, when it comes to my writing, a single compliment from a generous friend is sure to sustain my sense of self-worth for weeks.

[5] I will sometimes just term reading/writing as ‘literature’, without literature being confined to ‘narrative works of fiction’, but also including philosophy, history, etc.

[6] Sadly, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to even get university students to read—even when they know they’ll be quizzed on the readings, the readings go ignored.

[7] Indeed, since I was actually rereading this essay, I was also partly remembering previous interpretations I once had, but no longer hold, about all of these thinkers, and as such I am also in dialogue with previous versions of myself, as well. This last self-referential aspect is, of course, one of the great joys of rereading. 

[8] For a non-literary example of something similar, consider the common experience of your friend telling you about an argument they had with another mutual friend: While they’re talking, you’re not only listening to their account, but also imagining how your other friend would explain things differently; while also remembering and considering things they (or others) have done and said in the past that might be relevant to this argument; and you’re likely even already imagining what yet another friend will have to say about all of this when you get the chance to tell them about it later on… The sociality of human self-consciousness is such that we are never alone, even—or especially—inside of our own heads.

[9] This, by the way, is also my interpretation of one the underlying meanings of ‘the Fall’ of Adam and Eve: that humans are mediate creatures. This is because, in the moments after they both eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, they’re eyes are opened, and they then cover their nakedness. One way to read this is that they were particularly ashamed of their sexual organs. (This is Augustine’s famous, and incalculably influential, interpretation, for which there is no textual support, except that which he supplies through his own boundless ingenuity.) However, another possible reading is that, in that moment, Adam and Eve progressed from immediate creatures, whom simply exist in their bodies as they are, to mediate creatures, for whom even their very own body is something that must be transformed in some way to feel theirs. In other words, they become creatures for whom even their given bodies are problematic, and must be transformed in some way, so that they feel comfortable within them, so that they feel that their very bodies are indeed their own. All humans do this, from dreads to braids, or tattoos to scarification—we leave the marks of our will upon our bodies. We cover our bodies, even with just a loin-cloth, in order to say something about ourselves to ourselves, and to others. Before God expels Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, he himself makes them clothes, thereby acknowledging that the creatures he’s created will forevermore be those that mediate their existence with the world.

[10] Indeed, art can even be understood to include religion, science, mysticism, etc.—all of which are attempts to mediate and reconcile ourselves with ourselves, and each of which are products of human artifice. 

[11] So visceral does this relationship of co-interpretation become that I think marking in one’s own marginalia becomes essential. I believe that there are two distinct stages of honoring one’s books: during the first stage, venerating books means you keep their pages virginally unmarked from any pencil prodding, as you protect their pristine purity; but eventually you progress to the second stage, where you realize that truly respecting your books requires you to ravage their pages with a pencil. Doing so makes the books alive and vital to you, makes them—almost carnally—yours. Just look at Louis Althusser’s marginalia of one of Marx’s texts: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GHbAdtPWkAANggx?format=jpg&name=small . Or Kant’s copy of Baumgarten’s Metaphysica: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eh_Af-TXgAc22CJ?format=jpg&name=small  

[12] Rousseau, in his infamous Part I of the Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality Among Men, tries to imagine what humans might look like without language. The result resembles what we think of as humans in shape or size, but not substance. Rousseau’s great epoch-making insight was to first realize that human nature is culture: our very self-consciousness is constituted by our social setting and history, all linked together in and through language. In other words, by our very nature, human beings are walking, talking pieces of history and culture.   

[13] This passage, written by 20-year-old Franz Kafka, is pulled from a 1904 letter to his childhood friend, art-historian Oskar Pollak. In an earlier 1903 letter also addressed to Pollak, Kafka wrote, “Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle”. See his Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, p 16 & 10, respectively.

[14] Confessions, 7.10 & 8.12, respectively. In case your curious, those transformative words were: “Not in revelling in drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites”. Anyways, yeah: I guess you had to be there… But Augustine also writes about how to seriously read a book means to find oneself “labouring under the pain of the new life that takes birth within him” (8.6). Although presumably nobody who has ever actually utilized a uterus would reach for such an analogy, it nonetheless serves to speak to the element of self-creation that reading and writing make possible.  

[15] As Julian Barnes says in the very first sentence of his essay collection, Through the Window, “I have lived in books, for books, by and with books; in recent years, I have been fortunate enough to be able to live from books”, p x.

[16] It is for this reason a very telling aspect of our contemporary culture that the single type of long-form letter writing that does continue to this day is the annual “Christmas letter”: the one form of letter that comes with a general, ready-made, cookie-cutter shape; which encourages a more descriptive, list-like format (i.e., the noting of achievements, trips, or other life events) and discourages any genuine personal introspection; and which instead of sending to a single special friend we then spam out indiscriminately to everyone who has had the misfortune to have been added to our email contacts at some point. Indeed, the only thing that serves to halfway redeem this whole sordid ritual of the Christmas letter is the undeniable fact that so few of us even hardly bother to read them anyways!

[17] For example, and as those already in the know will have realized, the very title of my essay is a reworking of Raymond Carver’s short story (collection), wonderfully titled, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

[18] Notice also how one might reasonably take the opposite stance, and argue that it is precisely the greater immediacy of painting or music—that they do not as much yearn for and demand active interpretation—that makes these the more truly human art forms. Obviously, I disagree. But it’s more of a disagreement that’s fun to have and make, rather than one with anything too crucial at stake. As for why I would disagree, besides all of the reasons given over the course of this essay, I feel like this intimate linking of ‘immediacy’ to ‘humanity’ perhaps then leads to somewhat more mystical and mysterious views of what a human is—conceptions I can feel myself resisting on an almost cellular level.    

[19] First published in 1946, Auerbach (a German Jew), wrote Mimesis while in wartime exile in Istanbul. Without access to a scholarly library, he was able to quote from all of these books (often in their original languages) at great length, while also intimately elucidating the relationships between these varied texts. Now that is living with writers inside one’s mind as co-interpreters.  

[20] Think of how this line of intensely introspective literature continues through to the auto-fiction of Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, or Claire-Louise Bennet—three of the most experimental, exciting, and essential authors writing today.  

[21] In Chapter 10, which is unfortunately among the less read chapters of Mimesis, Auerbach shows how Antoine de le Sale, with an attention to the human body (which he inherits from Christian writing) begins to first drag literature down into the domestic sphere.  

[22] A similar kind of argument, made by Harold Bloom, is that characters in the literature of antiquity are never shown to have internal, transformative soliloquies, where through their own thinking, they change their own minds. Again, the claim being made is that this modern literary development both uncovered and ushered in genuine differences in how we came to experience our lives. Or in Bloom’s memorable phrasing, ‘Shakespeare invented the human being’, or at least ‘the human being’ as we have now come to recognize ourselves. After all, even the ever-philosophical Socrates is quick to always credit his external daimon for instigating any of his intellectual transformations.  

[23] I am talking about something that M.H. Abrams put much more concisely, when he said that writers and critics need a keen eye for the obvious. Great writing is always simple, that’s what makes it so difficult. But the double difficulty lies not only in achieving a simplicity in style, but also in content, since it is often the case that nothing is more difficult to perceive than the very obvious.

[24] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUTbnjIHfkg .  and also this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-gHoC47cKc  Burnham has also proven himself to be a talented actor, writer, and director. See Promising Young Woman for his acting, Inside for his writing, and Eighth Grade for his writing/directing. Basically, if you still see Bo as a silly comedian, then the joke is on you.  

[25] Have you heard of “second screen content”? Basically, this is the idea that, while you are watching a show on Amazon or Apple, it still isn’t enough—ideally you would also be simultaneously scrolling on your phone: e.g., ordering something you don’t need off Amazon, or downloading an app you don’t need from the Apple Store. Screen-writers are now being routinely told that the plots of their proposed shows are too complicated; that people might actually get off their phones and pay attention to their televisions! And that would be bad for business. (My brothers and sisters in Christ, this is what things have come to!) The logic of second-screen content, which produces your beloved reality TV and adds to the nostalgic but soulless reboots and reruns you can’t get enough of, goes like this: “Re-work this script, dumb it down, make the themes and tensions simple, and then repeat them. We want people to feel like they have the bandwidth to take-in our trashy content from both of the two screens illuminating their idiotically placid faces in the darkness of their living rooms each night”. That is what our corporate overlords think of us; and the way we all lap it up from their hands, I sometimes feel we deserve it. But no!   

[26] In this excellent article, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt shows how the pervasive phone culture that now characterizes childhood is hostile to many key aspects of one’ healthy personal and social development:  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/ 

[27] Did you catch that? Our feeds. A term that evokes the imagery of cattle in a feedlot, being fattened for slaughter; or of an ill person being fed drugs through intravenous drip in a hospital. 

[28] As we well know, phones have transformed our sense of time, and how we experience boredom and solitude. Can you imagine going to a coffee shop and just sitting there, without a book, phone, or friend? That must have once been the most ordinary thing in the world. Mention the possibility to a kid now, and you’ll hear “Um, it’s giving serial-killer…” By the way, I can’t think of kids and boredom without thinking of this short clip from Louis C.K.’s Louie, where he perfectly captures the fear parents can feel when confronted with their child’s boredom (although they’ll try to hide it), the way parents might try to impart some genuine wisdom in this moments, and the ways in which they’ll inevitably somewhat fumble the ball in doing so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0ETAVxXtec    

[29] https://www.businessinsider.com/kendrick-lamar-light-phone-sold-out-pglang-dumb-phone-instead-2023-11 . See also this short New Yorker article about ‘dumb phones’ https://link.newyorker.com/click/34991939.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

[30] And yes, I am now realizing, not without some horror, that I’m making an argument that basically amounts to: maybe the elites will save us. This is new territory for me, and I don’t like it at all. But maybe I have it all backwards: isn’t it often poor, marginalized groups that actually initiate new, cool trends, which are only then subsequently coopted by elites? Yes, that’s also right! So who knows from where our salvation may come.

[31] Unless, of course, you are a Catholic, in which case you agree with other Christians about the book, but then disagree because you believe that it shouldn’t actually be read at all.

[32] This is also what makes the advent of ChatGPT likely so destructive to the development of reading and writing skills (and all that this process—which is often necessarily a struggle)—entails. How many students can be expected to forego the option of an instantaneous essay, while being simultaneously seduced by all the other exploits the college experience has to offer? But writing and reading, unlike the addition of simple arithmetic, is not a quantitative process; it is arguable the human qualitative process; the primary mode through which we come to learn how to think. Because ChatGPT is not simply a ‘calculator for essays’, it worries me what its use might entail the loss of.