The Art of Reading
by Damon Young
(Melbourne, Scribe, 2016)
The written word encouraged a new liberty: to think, perceive or feel with greater awareness.
Page 4.
Without a reader, the magic stops.
Page 6.
Reading is an introduction to a more ambitious mind.
Page 6.
Without a reader, the text a stream of sensations: dark and light shapes.
Page 6.
We are creatures of meaning, and the universe is never spied as a naked fact.
Pages 6-7.
Words are portals of sorts: they frame reality, and become invisible as we peer.
Page 7.
Poetry puts on a show of words, just as painting displays colour, and music sound.
Page 7.
Reading is always a transformation of sensation into sense.
Page 7.
I piece together a cosmos from the author’s fragments.
Page 8.
Reading is always a meeting of two liberties: the artist’s and the audience’s.
Page 8.
The ubiquity of script masks the rarity and fragility of reading. What you are doing right now is, cosmically speaking, against the odds.
Page 9.
An early introduction to the written word provides an enormous personal and political advantage.
Page 10.
Literary fiction can contribute to a theory of mind, the idea we have of others’ mental states.
Page 10.
Reading has demonstrable benefits, but it is not a machine for producing geniuses or saints.
Page 11.
The primacy of experience is clear: a creaturely play between self and other, which includes confusion about the edges of each.
Page 12.
Reading affords experiences.
Page 12.
Writing takes the stuff of daily life and crafts it into an innovative view of self and world.
Page 12.
While reading might not use every limb or organ, it draws on the fullness of life, rendering it with clarity, curability or vividness.
Page 12.
From a quip on social media to biblical scrolls, writing gestures at some larger congress with the world; some universe beyond the glyphs.
Page 13.
I read because I enjoy the experience of reading: the encounter with a refined and restored vision of life.
Page 13.
Reading is desirable for its own sake and, unless it causes harm, no excuses need be given.
Page 13.
Literary worth is only realised in the doing: it is active, not passive.
Page 14.
Reading artfully requires a fragile poise between proclivities.
Page 14.
Virginia Wolfe called reading … a chance for virtues tonthrive.
Page 16.
To read well, I have to read: widely and carefully, mindful of my powers and responsibilities.
Page 16.
We treat our own behaviour as we do someone else’s: something to be examined, criticized, praised or ignored.
Page 16.
The virtues of reading ask not for schizoid surveillance, but for honest recollection and reflection.
Page 16.
By reading freely today I develop tomorrow’s prejudices - the point is to develop them conscientiously.
Page 16.
The virtues of reading are rarely celebrated. Reading well is treated as a rudimentary skill, not a lifelong ambition.
Page 17.
Authorship has become a glamorous professional persona, rather than a craft.
Page 17.
It is absurd to applaud reading while turning our backs on authors.
Page 18.
Expression, whether in poetry or philosophy, offers a chance for psychological lucidity.
Page 18.
The art of reading is also largely invisible to others.
Page 20.
Much of what makes reading so psychologically rich is private, and might be at odds with my public persona.
Page 20.
Angst is not just fear; not flinching at this or that threat. Angst is a mood, which spreads over the world.
Page 21.
Anxiety is an uncanny combination of heaviness and lightness, horror and exhilaration.
Page 21.
If the reader is as free as the author, then there is no escape from this play of potential.
Page 21.
Every string of letters can be an existential challenge.
Page 21.
The writer can be a way of making reading safe.
Page 21.
Whether in scripture, newspaper columns or graphic novels, easy certainty is sought in the pages. Words become someone else’s job.
Page 22.
Augustine urged good Christians to pick up the Bible for love, but treated most writing with contempt.
Page 23.
Virtues … are best developed communally.
Page 24.
The chapter existed before I was born.
Page 26.
Nothing profoundly new can be invented.
Page 26.
Curiosity is encouraged by the greatness of the truth involved.
Page 33.
Craving rumours or scandals is … a way to stave off discomfiting uncertainty.
Page 33.
By definition, curiosity often has unpredictable results.
Page 36.
It takes a sense of brooding possibility to recognise the charm of the actual.
Page 38.
Curiosity can also become a way of avoiding why we are curious; a way of ignoring our own quirks and flaws.
Page 38.
Batman afforded the conceit of adult wisdom, gained one panel at a time.
Page 46.
Curiosity about curiosity unmasks its own mixed humanity.
Page 47.
Groaning at meandering prose or drawn-out plotting is part of the reader’s lot.
Page 49.
It is because we recall previous paragraphs, and anticipate new ones, that the current phrases make sense.
Page 52.
Reading can be painful because it makes us endure the very human feeling of time running out.
Page 53.
Patience is about bearing ills, rather than confronting horrors - it is not bravery, in other words. To be patient is to tolerate physical pain.
Page 54.
Forbearance is valuable because it contributes to something good - otherwise it is simply stubbornness or numbness.
Page 55.
Fiction is an invitation to consider other minds, and to feel more keenly their troubles.
Page 55.
A sometimes tedious book can have various benefits.
Page 56.
Literary patience is not a duty to read every work to the end; to endure a thousand smug tweets or stanzas of doggerel. What constitutes patience changes with text and reader.
Page 56.
If I am in the right humour, patience will help me welcome whatever is proffered.
Page 57.
What simplifies Brown’s pages is the lack of innovation and sympathy: the prose is almost wholly cliché and the characters rice-paper puppets. The Da Vinci Code is pure plot, without the complications of Henry James’s language or psychological nuance. It takes zero toil to move from scene to scene, puzzle to puzzle. It is masterfully generic. Brown’s bestselling story is perfect for mass audiences, with little in common but their gratitude for a brief escape.
Page 57.
Because Brown’s prose is so commonplace, his characters so transparent, I keep stopping every few sentences.
Page 58.
The Da Vinci Code is for humans but not about them, and this mars the smooth plotting. I want the novel to end - not for the climax, but for the banality to stop.
Page 58.
A patient reader might pick up a Dan Brown novel fgor subtle prose, psychological acumen or scholarly erudition - then rightly put it down soon after, permanently.
Page 59.
Patience is not a sexy virtue.
Page 59.
Forbearance can leave readers with greater awareness of themselves: recognition of sympathies or animating concepts.
Page 59.
Nostalgia, regret, mockery and loss - they attach themselves to things, and are pulled along by even the most innocent words. To read with maturity is to witness a more crowded human reality.
Page 62.
Experience is not simply knowledge: certainty about facts. It is not a knack for getting on, although it can contribute to this virtue.
Page 63.
We can make more or less of experience; we can question or accept, confront or repress. But we cannot avoid, falsify or synthesis its basic transforming force - it must be. Even when we live idly or shrink from adventure, we gain ‘thickened motive and accumulated character.’
Page 63.
Forbearance is necessary because we are partial beings, and our incompleteness varies with time.
Page 64.
It is a common literary conceit, in which moral excellence and perseverance produce victory - or at least dignified defeat.
Page 66.
We are creatures of rhythm. Life has cadences: expansion and contraction, inhalation and exhalation, departure and arrival.
Page 67.
We seek unities, the sense of having begun and finished some whole event. And this basic physiological and psychological principle is also at work in art, including literature: we look for completion.
Page 67.
We are born in what the poet Horace called in medias res: in the middle of things. We die the same way, amid breaths, seasons, manuscripts. While existence is punctuated by the birth canal and coffin, this is only observed by others.
Page 68.
Incompleteness is unavoidable. Things cease, but they do not always conclude.
Page 69.
What often characterises evil is this craving for command. The villains do not merely lead: they rule, or aspire to.
Page 70.
Villains see all things as means to an end.
Page 70.
Apophatic theology = the study of what divinity is not.
Page 72.
Vanity is not only deluded, but also ridiculous.
Page 84.
For Paul and later theologians like Augustine, the sprit of Christ cannot enter the soul of an arrogant overseer.
Page 84.
For the Christian fathers, crowing about literary study was bad enough - falsely implying knowledge, as the Orthodox clergy did with Kazantsakis’s novel, was wickedly vain.
Page 84.
For theologians, the arrogant Christian glories in his own charity or faith, without recognising those as God’s gifts.
Page 85.
As hi egotism grows, so does the braggart’s delusion.
Page 85.
When suitable fools cannot be found, they are invented.
Page 85.
Threatened by irrelevance or impotence, a pundit saves face by bluffing mastery.
Page 85.
Those with weak identities need simple enemies.
Page 85.
Vain reading is a betrayal of the basic literary covenant. The author offers her words at liberty, and the reader freely accepts responsibility for rendering them.
Pages 86-87.
To read well, pride is necessary. Not arrogance or hubris, but a careful, critical intellect, unhampered by deferential lowliness.
Page 93.
This phrase makes a helpful epigraph for Whitehead’s philosophy: ‘No fact is merely itself’. His point was not that there is no such thing as fact or fiction, true of false. Instead, Whitehead was noting that any one thing is always part of a broader and deeper mess of things.
Page 95.
All things re actually processes|: reaching out to one another in (and as) time and space.
Page 95.
To best contribute to a civilised life, scripture asks for curious respect, not literal obedience.
Page 97.
The proud reader becomes intimate with detractors and defenders, and their roles in a tradition of debate.
Page 98.
To see literary works as fallible is to recognise our own errors, ambiguities and vicissitudes. We reflect proudly on writings, sacred or profane, precisely because we do not have a God’s-eye view; because pronouncements of perfection are always flawed.
Page 99.
Intemperance is an appetite for the wrong things, or too much of the right things. It is a failure, not of will, but of value.
Page 102.
Intemperance is a lack of mental order.
Page 102.
Indulgency can corrupt health, tarnish reputations and compromise ethics, because it puts the wrong things first.
Page 103.
Great literature affords a chance to be drawn away from our ego-centric fantasies.
Page 105.
Ethics requires more than a personal account of good and bad, and the freedom to decide either way. It also asks for a basic willingness to approach the world honestly; to develop a passion for truth, instead of comforting deception.
Page 105.
It matters what we love.
Page 106.
Everyone hungers and thirsts, and most lust - it is an organic response to animal existence.
Page 112.
Among readers, it is easier to find binging than cool abstinence.
Page 112.
Reading is usually slavish and plodding; for weak souls, too dependent to reflect for themselves.
Page 114.
Merely colleting tomes is not comprehending them.
Page 118.
Reading while weary can be oddly rewarding.
Page 120.
Speaking as a novelist as well as a bibliophile, Woolf believed that readers emit their opinions into the atmosphere of words, which are then inhaled by authors.
Page 125.
Justice was an ethical impulse before it was law.
Page 128.
At its most basic, justice is the willingness and ability to give others their dues. In this, it is a distinctly social virtue.
Page 129.
Justice concerns our treatment of others.
Page 129.
Reading gave not only gratification, but also standards.
Page 132.
Justice is possible because the will is amenable to reflection.
Page 132.
It is a fact that not all facts matter.
Page 158.