Learning to read part 1: What is reading, and why do we do it?

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Last time, in “What makes an editor?,” I explained that the most important skills of great editing are reading, asking, and listening, and into the new year we’re going to cover all of these in theory and practice. In our next post, I’m going to share some principles and practices to help improve your relationship with reading and embrace reading as part of your writing practice (and full, human life).

But first, this week, I want us to think about what this word really means. Reading? If you think you know all that it is, you might be surprised by what you read today! First we’ll discover the complexity and multi-dimensionality of the verb “to read,” and I’ll propose a definition you might agree to share with me going forward…

Thank you for being here! 🧙🏻‍♀️ This will be fun!

Reading as movement.

The meaning of reading

What do you think it means to read? Well, basically, reading means to comprehend the meaning of symbols. But in what ways? Is the meaning of the symbols always shared, or fixed? Are there different ways to read a symbol or combinations of symbols? Sometimes this reading involves simultaneous telling—is reading also translation? What is the role of the decipherer to the nature of the puzzle? Questions like these emerged as the meaning of “to read” evolved over hundreds of years.

Look at a little Shakespeare moment from Twelfth Night. The Fool is meant to read a letter to Olivia written by Malvolio, who believes Olivia loves him (she doesn’t). The Fool begins a dramatic reading of the letter, which Olivia interrupts to ask, “How now, art thou mad?” The Fool replies, “No Madam, I do but reade madnesse.”

How many meanings of ‘reade’ can you pick out? The Fool means most directly, “I am reading a letter written by a crazy person, and the madness I project is only revealing the truth of the letter.” A next meaning is, ‘I only appear mad to you,’ as in a more modern, “he reads crazy,” ie, “he appears to be crazy.” Continuing. ‘Reade’ has an additional meaning of “to see,” as in, “I but see madness in this letter,” which tumbles into a definition of that includes a deeper kind of seeing: “I see and understand madness,” and further, “I reflect that madness back to you in my reading.”

“To read” in this one line means “to appear,” “to see,” “to understand,” “to perform,” “to reflect” the madness on the page—and, I think, “to relate,” both in the transitive sense of “to tell” or “to tell of” as well as “to relate to,” or “to connect.” An actor playing a wise Fool might throw some arch on the tone of this line to imply the Fool is in fact reading Olivia, using multiple interpretations of “to read” to throw a little insult back in her face: “It’s not me, it’s you.”

In this Bynes-Tatum classic based on Twelfth Night, a spider plays Malvolio.

Let’s look at another, from Moby-Dick:

“Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face, in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read if it you can.”

Melville’s using the word “read” in at least a few ways—how many can you detect? We have at the very least “to look upon,” furthermore the challenge “to discern,” and also the foreboding, somewhat illicit sense of “to foretell,” as in, “what will the meaning of this imperious head be to this, our tale?” The meaning is also quite clearly (if you’ve read Melville) pretty sarcastic—the object of your interpretation is completely unaffected by all your little worrying over your little language and thoughts. “Read it if you can.” There’s something of the old sailor’s lifted eyebrow and Scottish wink.

***

As far as I learned it in my college History of the English Language courses, led by an old bear who kept the gray cigarettes he chain-smoked in the pocket of the huge brown-striped fur coat he wore fall, winter and spring while he paced around the college yards, this shit goes back. In the proto-Indo-European theory of language, the Dutch raden, the German raten, the Icelandic rada, the Swedish roda, and the Old Norse ratha evolved from the PIE root reudh, which meant “to advise.” A Sanskrit cognate radh of the verb radhnoti meant “to achieve” or “to accomplish.” The Old English verb raeden meant “to counsel.” The word “riddle” shares this root—think about it, a riddle, a secret whose deliberate masking some wise counsel can seek to advise upon.

In the 14th century (and again, as far as I, a non-scientist, non-time traveling vegetarian can possibly know), “to read” gained the meaning “to study”—a build-out of the idea of reading as puzzling out as much as comprehending. From Old and Middle English, Old Saxon, and Middle Low German, roots of “read” came to mean everything from “to predict,” “to counsel,” “to rule,” “to arrange,” to, intriguingly, “deliverance.” In the Middle Low German “read” carried that meaning I mentioned in the line from Twelfth Night—“to relate.”

While in Old English we would “raed hwaet ic maene” (read what it means), by 1325 we could “Red qwat it may beo” (read what it may be). Think about the sense of reading ones fate or ones fortune. Reading has always held a sense of portension, reading not just what is literally before us but the possibilities inherent in or implied by or made possible by what was being read—a revolutionary power, indeed. Reading can make a person powerful, and it has the power to make things so. Reading has long been understood as a portal. Which can make it a tool. Which can make it a weapon.

As the word ‘to read’ evolved and gained meanings, the reader herself gained power. Etymologically speaking, at first we could read what is there through deciphering symbols; to guessing what they might be and reading subtext (“to read someone’s face”); to discovering their true meaning (puzzling out a riddle); to predicting what will be from what can be read now. What became available for people all kinds of people to read mattered too, immensely; the reader’s growing power was also contained in the expanded meanings of the noun and verb. And as her reading power expanded, a sense of responsibility toward what is read did too.

By the 1400s (you might remember, the century of Gutenberg’s big Press Release) some anxiety emerged that what was read was not always understood, that “to achieve” or “to accomplish” by reading had been a given and were now, with more and more text available to be read, slipping away. We had to work to understand! The OED cites an obscure source, “Dis. of Women,” by an author Douce, “Whomen of our tonge done bettyr rede and understande [th]ys langage [th]an eny o[th]er”—English-speaking women were wise to know the intricacies of language, to detect, one imagines, when it is being used against them. In 1483 printing-press-pioneer William Caxton lamented a poor reader as, “He that redeth and no thynge understondeth.” In 1556 Nicholas Udall wrote, “Dyd not I for the nonce… reade his letter in a wrong sense for daliance?” Reading could be something, through misinterpretation, that you can get wrong, something that pushes us apart. And, as poor readers as we could be, reading itself couldn’t always answer questions. In 1671 my best friend John Milton, in Paradise Regain’d, wrote of the one “Who reads Incessantly… Uncertain and unsettl’d still remains.” Sound familiar?

***

The meaning of “to read” as “to achieve” and “to accomplish” is closely held by many writers I meet. Not just writers. People who used to love reading, and now they never do it. They fell out of reading during the pandemic and haven’t picked it up again. Or since college, or business school, or starting a company, or a family. Sometimes they’re afraid to read because they don’t already know what’s in the books. There’s a lot of worry, basically, about it.

We’ve all seen people on “social media” (aka antisocial propaganda, no offense!) brag about reading 50, 100 books a year, or even a month. They race through a meal of “information” and toss their reads aside like wasted ribs, consuming the fat off the bone in the form of sloganeering and leaving the marrow to rot. A checklist of books to get through, racing toward the dopamine hit of every final page—one of few they’ll actually read all the way through. Perhaps these people also organize their books by color. But not with the spines in. It’s important that everyone who comes to visit is able to see how much this person has accomplished with their reading.

But I don’t mean just to pick on these types. Whether it’s 3x-speeding through all the bad startup founder books, actually finishing Infinite Jest, or endeavoring to read Proust in the original, many readers seek status through their reading accomplishments.

For many of you, the gift of reading has been pushed aside by defining reading as achieving, a meaning it’s held onto for many hundreds of years, but is only one of dozens of “reads” on the term “to read.” Whether you read something fast, or something smart, or something people recommend or other people like, something you “should.” Whether you feel like you get it right away, or ever. Whether you never finish. Whether you get it wrong. So much worry about achievement.

The other, compatible definition many people associate with “to read” is “to study”—the idea of reading to get information carries a tinge of what still lives well in the British, as in, “reading Latin at Christ Church”—to read as studying with the goal of passing exams. I am reading to get some information I don’t currently have, to fill my empty brain-bucket. Reading as symbolic interpretation, reading as a way of gaining, reading as studying against a standard to be graded on, and reading as understanding and comprehension (but to whose definition?) are all at play in this reading.

In my work I come back, again and again and again, to the wish that the writers I talk with stopped thinking of reading in only these two narrow ways—as achievement and as information-getting / studying-against-judgment. When I hear about their reading practices, I ask, is that how you want to be read? I ask, what do you like to read? They are reading to learn, instead of engaging in the life-long practice of learning to read.

What does it mean to learn to read? I do have practical principles to share in two weeks! Please subscribe for free to join us for more. But first, to end this journey, I want to propose that we adopt a new definition of “to read” going forward—or, I s’pose, pick up a very old one again.

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***

I come back, and back, and back to that Middle Low German raden, which holds the meaning—in addition to the intriguing “to rule” and the revolutionary “to predict”—the persistent hum, a Pythagorean hum, if you ask me, of this one interpretation of “to read”:

to relate.

The sense of “to tell” by reading aloud is a given. And there is the sense of “to connect,” which is also embedded within “to tell.” In order to relate, there has to be more than one person involved in the reading.

In Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, about a group of precocious British schoolboys bound for Oxbridge and the clash of existential pedagogical philosophy with 1980s economic imperative, and also male-identifying queerness, and war, and what history is and how it’s made (read: read!), and sex, one scene stays with me (ok, you got me, they all do! This is one of my favorite pieces of art). In the film version, adapted by Bennett and starring the original stage cast (and with a fantastic queer score as well), we’re in a classroom, the mood is very ‘after school.’ A young teen, struggling with his identity as a poor gay kid in post-war England and the multiple longings that seem to define his life, sits across from his teacher, a lonely, complex, imperfect poet-man played by the late, brilliant Richard Griffiths. The afternoon light filters in as the boy, Posner, stands and recites Thomas Hardy’s 1899 poem “Drummer Hodge.”*

The teacher, Hector, explains to Posner some meaning of the poem, and offers some way in which this poem, written long ago about a boy dead in the Second Boer War, might just resonate with the young troubled reader today. Referring to Hardy’s use of the word “uncoffined” to describe Hodge’s body in the second line, Hector instructs:

“A compound adjective, formed by putting un- in front of the noun. Or verb, of course. Un-kissed. Un-rejoicing. Un-confessed. Un-embraced. It’s a turn of phrase that brings with it a sense of not sharing, of being out of it. Whether because of diffidence or shyness, but a holding back. Not being in the swim. Can you see that?”

“Yes, sir,” Posner says, Britishly underplaying how much he does. “I felt that a bit.”

Hector goes on. “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

In the film, Hector closes his eyes. As he says these words, he gropes a hand out in front of him across the desk, stretching out his fingers into an open palm, face up. Posner, watching, is clearly uncertain whether he’s expected to—whether he should—take his teacher’s hand. Moments, perhaps regretted, flicker past, the hand is retracted, a fist against the chest.

In the moments of Posner’s hesitation, a question about our definition of reading is posed, and left, unperceived, but not unsanswered: what is reading for?

What will you do with the hand that reaches out from the page? How will reading make you more a part of this shared world? What is the point of reading if not to have revealed, from the oceans of the distant or dead, the oceans of what has been thought and guessed, felt and offered, ways upon ways of reaching out and grasping the hands of the living?

***

So, think about it: What do you think reading means? And what does reading mean to you? What definitions have resonated with you?

I’ve touched on only a few of the many, many meanings that “to read” carries today. See if you can list more than I did here, and then look it up to see what you missed.

Looking forward

So, now that we have a sense of the many and old/new ways we might understand the meaning of reading, next post will show us more practically how to read. I can’t focus! I used to love it and now I don’t! I’m not retaining anything! I hate everything I read! If that’s you, if you need to repair your relationship with reading or get deeper with the one you have, I’ll cover you here. And please send me your questions and wonderings about reading in advance, and reading for writers, so I can reply here for others to benefit from.

The full text of “Drummer Hodge” below!

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* “Drummer Hodge”

I

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
     Uncoffined—just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
     That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
     Each night above his mound.
 

II

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—
     Fresh from his Wessex home—
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
     The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
     Strange stars amid the gloam.
 

III

Yet portion of that unknown plain
     Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
     Grow up a Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
     His stars eternally.

—Thomas Hardy, 1899