Deep Reading
“Nothing is ‘inevitable’.” With this mantra, William Deresiewicz introduces his plan to counter the technology-led transformation of reading. We read today on our computers, on Kindles, and on our phones. We read by listening to audiobooks while driving or mowing the lawn. We read by googling for phrases that we need to quote, skimming books for their useful nuggets. We read on Twitter and we read by asking ChatGPT for quotations or texts that fit our needs. How often do you read as I read only 30 years ago, reading a book cover to cover, without checking my phone, without interruption, without checking my email. What does this change in the way we read mean? What have we lost?
Deresiewicz had a student who loved to read the old way. He didn’t own a smartphone or Wi-fi. “He read, books, slowly, cover to cover. Fiction, poetry, history, thought; book after book after book after book. Having determined to work his way through the whole of the Western philosophical canon (“to run through the course set by civilization up to one’s own time,” as Mark Greif has put it), he started learning ancient Greek by way of making a beginning. He believed that what’s at stake, when you read a book, is nothing less than life itself.”
Matthew Strother—Deresiewicz’s student—wanted to create a retreat, a school, where people would come together to read in the old way. Sadly, Matthew died of Cancer before he could realize his dream. To honor his student, Deresiewicz has worked with Matthew’s partner Berta Willisch, to create this school on land they bought in the Hudson Valley. The Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life allows students to read one book over ten days,for three hours a day around a table in the barn. There are “Long meals, long conversations, shared labor and play. No phones, no spinning world.”
Deresiewicz led the third session of the Strother’s Center in a reading of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The experience is his answer to the question: How Should One Read a Book? Deresiewicz writes:
I was also looking forward to evading the conventions of academic literary study. You know: theory, jargon, interpretive paradigms, secondary texts with their secondhand thoughts. Students in the program do not know what they’ll be reading —not even if it will be literature or philosophy or history or something else— until they get there. The point is to enroll people who are attracted to the idea of the experience itself, not a particular book or author or genre, but also to prevent them from stuffing their heads in advance with clever things to say that they had read in some professor’s monograph. It would just be us and the book and what we could make of it.
For the same reason, I looked for an edition of my chosen text —it was A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, because Berta had asked the faculty to select books that had been transformative for us, and I had pretty much become Stephen Dedalus when I was 19— that included as little ancillary material as possible. I wanted one with no introduction, no notes, no aids or guides, no nothing but the naked text. It is remarkable how difficult that proved to find. No one, apparently, trusts the reader, certainly not the student reader, to encounter a classic like Portrait on their own. I went to Powell’s, here in Portland, Oregon, where I found at least a dozen editions, old and new, but not a one that wasn’t garlanded with extras. The Penguin edition, which seems to be the market leader, has a 37-page introduction and 52 pages of notes. At last, Gabriella found something online: the Viking Compass edition of 1964, slim and sturdy, handsomely designed, and available, scraping together the sellers, in just enough copies.
It also helped, in the event, that my students arrived with a variety of intellectual backgrounds. Ena is a former English major, now a film and book critic; Caroline is a creative writer and visual artist; Frank studies the history of education; Brian teaches ethics and theology; Gabriella is a former philosophy major with interests in mysticism and monasticism; and Ben, an autodidact college dropout, reads everything that he can get his hands on. Such heterogeneity is something that we look for in assembling the groups (and another reason we don’t announce the readings in advance). We don’t want a bunch of former lit majors studying literature or philosophers studying philosophy, people who have all been initiated into the disciplinary norms, who know the sorts of things that you’re supposed to say. We want our students reading as generalists, as amateurs — in other words, as human beings, with everything they might bring.
So much for the kinds of reading that we don’t do in the program. What do we do? The rubric that Berta and I arrived at is “deep reading”. The term’s imprecision is part of the point. Every aspect of the program is meant to be conducted in a spirit of experimentation. Our idea is to create structures within which students (and teachers) can improvise, explore, and play. Matthew laid down principles. We are investigating what they mean, and what else they might mean. So it is with deep reading, which we define, simply, as serious, sustained engagement with texts of lasting value.
Whatever else it is, deep reading is slow reading. That is why the program only does a single book each session, and not a long one, either. Portrait runs about 250 pages, and we talked about it for thirty hours of seminar time — the equivalent of twelve weeks, more than three quarters of a semester, in a standard college course. Nor was there a single day we didn’t have to cut our conversation short.
Beyond that, for me, deep reading means first of all close reading: the scrupulous examination of the text for patterns of language and image, narrative structures and strategies, manipulations of generic expectations, formal balances and juxtapositions, allusions, concealments, ambiguities, and anything else you can find, then the further attempt to interpret them. The afternoon the students arrived, I handed out a sheet with some orienting material. At the top, I put two quotations. The first was from David Neidorf, the former longtime president of Deep Springs College: “To read a book truly is to cooperate with its effort to teach you something.” The second was from Ursula K. Le Guin: “The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.” Says it, that is, like all art, through form, which it is the purpose of close reading to expound.