Phenomenologists of reading

For many years a thought had routinely come to mind:

An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only.

I had forgotten who said it or where I read it, but looking it up now it turns out it was CS Lewis who said that. ¹

I thought of this often when encountering comments made by readers of important books, where the reader either completely misunderstood the text or seemed to lack the requisite background knowledge to accurately interpet it.

Bachelard

I recently encountered an even more exacting variation on this theme of re-reading. Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, describes the first reading of a book as a "too passive" affair.

...every good book should be re-read as soon as it is finished. After the sketchiness of the first reading comes the creative work of reading. We must then know the problem that confronted the author. The second, then the third reading...give us, little by little, the solution of this problem. Imperceptibly, we give ourselves the illusion that both the problem and the solution are ours. The psychological nuance: "I should have written that," establishes us as phenomenologists of reading.²

Criteria for what counts as a "good book" may vary depending on one's interests and values. I can't imagine, though, a genuinely good book with respect to which it wouldn't be worth establishing oneself as a phenomenologist of reading.

How many books can you think of that you have re-read, or would consider re-reading? I can't think of one book I've read multiple times, where I didn't learn something unexpected.

I think the presumption of command over the material one gains on "completing" their first reading of a text will inevitably fade quickly upon taking it up again. And again.

In this way reading becomes and exercise in intellectual humility. It enables a deeper kind of learning.

Hadot

These views of literacy and re-reading capture a variation on the theme of Socratic wisdom, of intellectual humility, or modesty. One might call it, as Pierre Hadot does of an earlier age in philosophy, a spiritual exercise.

And yet we have forgotten how to read: how to pause, liberate ourselves from our worries, return into ourselves, and leave aside our search for subtlety and originality, in order to meditate calmly, ruminate, and let the texts speak to us. This, too, is a spiritual exercise, and one of the most difficult. As Goethe said: 'Ordinary people don't know how much time and effort it takes to learn how to read. I've spent eighty years at it, and I still can't say that I've reached my goal.'³

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Footnotes

1. Lewis, C.S. (October 28, 2002). On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 16. An additional remark from the same section fills things out a bit: " We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness." pp. 16-17. ↩

2. Bachelard, Gaston (1964). The Poetics of Space. Boston, Beacon Press (1964), p. 21. ↩

3. Hadot, Pierre (1995). Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson. p. 109. ↩