On Reading and Thinking
blog“The art of not reading is an important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the public at any particular time. When some pamphlet, novel or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Fill a man with toast and his appetite for haute cuisine diminishes dramatically. Fill a man with celebrity gossip, current affairs, blogs, and everything else that makes up the internet and his appetite for great literature likewise disappears.
It is a long time since reading was civilized man’s pre-eminent form of cultural entertainment. Nowadays, we are dazzled by television, cinema and computer games. Equally noteworthy is the fact that there are apparently more words in one edition of the Sunday Times than Shakespeare read in an entire lifetime. Was he less intelligent than modern man? Of course not. In the same way as Google searching has replaced the fact-remembering part of the brain, books provided an endless source of stimulation that removed the need to think for yourself. Why bother, when someone else has probably already done it for you?
Information overload is upon us and it is making us incapable of thinking with any depth or clarity. There is too much noise when what we need is time, space, silence, and the absence of distractions.
Words are everywhere in our culture: you can’t go five yards without seeing someone clutching the Metro or squinting at their iPhone. But reading books is now a strange activity. According to the Guardian stating most men in Britain never read books. According to American figures 80 percent of U.S. families neither bought nor read a book last year.
On the other hand there are people like me, reading addicts who can’t leave the house without a book and spend more time choosing what to read on the toilet than they actually spend on the toilet. Reading addicts have suffered greatly with the coming of the internet, where everything you could ever want to know is a few clicks away. I’ve tried to limit the number of blog feeds I consumed and banned myself from going onto news sites during office hours, but my self-control is quickly eroded and I soon get back into my old habits.
So what, I wonder, happens when you stop reading and start thinking? This time I decided to go cold turkey and cut out all reading as an experiment in living. I would read no blogs, no books, no news, no pamphlets, and no email. It would be like that man who read the entire OED over the course of year, except that I wouldn’t be reading and it would only last a week.
It was my vaguely formulated thesis that people who don’t clog their minds with useless information are better able to confront the reality of situations, to think back and learn things from their own lives, and thus to make much better decisions.
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The first thing you notice when you stop reading is that the world is littered with text on every surface. How resonant do the words Armitage Shanks appear when you don’t read! Code becomes richer. The words that you use – the Americanisms like center and color leap off the page far more than usual. The fewer words you consume, the more weight the words you do consume take on. Words have meaning again.
Second thing is that I find myself automatically going to read something and then managing to stop myself right at the last minute. Reading has become automatic.
Third thing is that I enjoy writing a lot more. I have long suspected that there was a diametric relationship between reading and writing. When you read nothing you come to realise that you don’t lack knowledge about the things that matter, only about trivia. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde: Nothing worth knowing can ever be googled.
Fourth, by removing the sense of reading, it is possible that my auditory and visual senses have become stronger. Certainly, I have been noticing things in the world — text and images — a lot more.
Fifth, there is the toxic aspect of detoxification when you give up reading. All the banalities about footballers that I have slurped up with my eyes, all of the trash talk about about television on livejournal, these are the things that burble to the surface of my consciousness. Once they are all gone, what will I be left with? It’s difficult to know now. I guess I will simply be more mindful, without all that information to distract me. I worried that I might be less intelligent, not challenging myself with a barrage of infromation, but in terms of knowledge, it is quality that counts.
There are two theories about what all the garbage in the world does to those who consume it: 1) is that it fills them with garbage, making their thoughts garbage and their actions garbage. and 2) is that the garbage acts like compost from which beauty grows.
The great fear of the person who gives up all information is that information is the fertilizer that you need to write. My wife claims that books and reading provide fuel for her own investigations. This is why she is an academic. To paraphrase Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, academics are people whose minds require constant stimulation from others to remain alert. For them, an original thought is akin to a fart. They chew the cud of other people’s thought and then fart out the occasional thought. We should sometimes think things out for ourselves.
Of course, it would be an awful shame to have to stop reading entirely. Imagine having to go on a long journey without a book to distract you from the millions of petty annoyances.
In the modern age, it isn’t what you know or even who you know — it’s how you filter out what and who you don’t want to know that makes the difference.
It is said that Marcel Proust was the most annoying companion with whom to go for a walk because he would suddenly become enraptured by a beautiful flower and stare at it for hours. It is difficult to imagine a contemporary writer doing the same. More likely they would get out their camphone and moblog to the world.
I love the silence of the reading free universe. Also, I have noticed that my eyes hurt a lot less – all that strain from reading a million blogs a day was doing serious physical damage as well as the mental retardation.
So the results so far from my experiment have been:
- more time
- more energy
- greater clarity
- ease of speech
- more directness
You could argue that reading undermines your confidence by assailing you with contrary viewpoints, you try to juggle them or incorporate salient arguments into your opinion but all you get is cognitive dissonance. The reading addict knows everything but understands nothing. They haven’t had time to digest.
Reducing your reading is to concentrate your sense of self in a world that has been diluted to homeopathic levels. Less quantity necessarily means more quality (even if it is just because you have more space to think). The internet allows you to know everything, but understand nothing. There is no time to reflect.
When you are on an information diet, you come to be very careful about what information you do consume. The thing that started me reading again was watching Lars von Trier’s grim horror film Antichrist. My mind was so full of concentrated images of torture that I had to dilute it with reading. I really wish I hadn’t seen it now. From now on, only pleasant amusing films.