Tuesday, October 07, 2003
(12:30 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Reading Slowly
Maybe it's just a matter of having read too much Plato lately, but tonight I thought of a common cliche that has started to seem highly questionable to me. In a book in my intro to philosophy class, I remember the author making the claim that the best readers are the slowest readers, and he romanticized a class over Homer where they just read a line of one of his epics each class and thoroughly studied it. At the time, it seemed like a great idea, a way to get the kind of thorough knowledge I desired at that time and still desire.
Yet is it really self-evident that with reading, slower is better? For certain texts, that may well be the case, but often, getting bogged down in the details will keep one from understanding the text as a whole. For example, I might read a paragraph that seems unclear to me, and it might turn out that the unclarity is there for a reason and that it is removed in a later passage -- but I, like a moron, plug away on this one paragraph, determined not to move forward until I understand it. Similarly, in a book or article full of individual facts, reading slowly and pondering each individual fact is a great way to lose track of the broader picture and thus of the context that gives each fact meaning.
I would propose that the best reader is the one who reads at the pace that the text imposes on her. Some texts are faster-paced, and some texts are slower-paced, and a good reader should be able to detect and then follow the pace that the author intended. For instance, the first reading of something like Heidegger will likely be slow, since his serpentine reasoning is very difficult to understand in a broad sense. Something like Nietschze, however, should be read more quickly, since he desires not so much to trace the intimate corners of the paths of thought, but rather a cumulative, jolting effect. I would even argue that certain authors, such as Zizek or Pynchon, intend to be read twice, since the broad sweep and the individual details are impossible to see at the same time.
Thus the best reader is not someone who follows some stupid rule about reading as slowly as possible, but rather someone who actually respects the particularity of the text she's reading at the time she reads it. The best reader should be equally capable of reading slowly and reading quickly, and she should know when to do each. I suppose an argument can be made that people tend to read too quickly and thus that the emphasis on slow reading is a strategic move, but I don't think that really corresponds to the facts. Part of what keeps many people from genuinely enjoying reading is that they are never taught how to read both quickly and well--that is, they are taught to skim, which is not reading at all. Telling people who look at a text as a repository of individual "answers" that they need to read more slowly is not a solution--in fact, it's a punishment.
That's my educational theory for the moment.
