Reading The Hard Way

The other day when I was talking about ways of reading there was one important one I missed, and I think I know why. Essentially all the ways I mentioned were related to reading almost solely for pleasure, because that's why I read. But there's another reason for reading which I've become very conscious lately of having neglected for too long, the variety that might be termed reading for study. I'm not talking about examinations here or any kind of academic accreditation - at my age I regard that as fundamentally pointless, and basically have thought that way for the last twenty-five years. I'm talking about the kind of study one undertakes to develop the life of the mind, as it were. And in this respect I've been lazy (basically using the excuse to myself that I'm not pursuing any kind of pointless accreditation, failing to accept the simple truth that certain varieties of thought require discipline, and for these the pleasure principle isn't enough.)

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking myself too hard on the head over this. I'm only concerned with ensuring a mild amount of the kind of tough reading I have in mind - but I am concerned with ensuring it. So what exactly am I talking about here?

Essentially I'm thinking of the slowest possible kind of reading, even slower than my reading of the Sonnets - though that particular style of reading comes close to what I have in mind. This is the kind of reading you need to employ when looking at texts of a philosophical nature especially. You read the article, if that's what it is, once, usually straight through, to get the shape of the argument - but you know you're not following the details. Then you go paragraph by paragraph, or sentence by sentence if necessary, reading each one intensely until you know you've at least followed the thread coherently. It's useful to read aloud at this stage. Then you put it all together again and see what holes you can spot in the argument, or what consequences come to mind if you accept what the writer is saying.

To be honest, another stage should follow. Once the entirety of the argument is grasped you really should make notes - not because you're preparing for an external test, but as a test of yourself and the degree to which you've genuinely made the ideas your own and extended your mind, as it were. Unfortunately I'm just too darned lazy to do this.

Oddly enough I sometimes find myself employing a number of the stages above on students' essays - really bad ones, I'm afraid. The good ones are easy to read. They move with clarity from point to obvious point. The weak ones invariably tie themselves in knots. In this case the intense reading functions as a means of confirming the lack of coherence and, more interestingly, trying to figure out what mental processes, if any, were taking place that led to the knotty mess. The problem here is that the intensity of the experience is a guarantee of a headache. Oddly enough, even Wittgenstein and Kant at their knottiest have never made me turn to the Panadol.