What Happens When You Stop Reading
A global oral sensorium machine.
Reading is hard.
Certain corners of the internet prostrate themselves as we find ourselves in the soon-to-be-post-literate West. Much has been written about who isn’t reading anymore and how little. That, for example, at least 28% of the population is now functionally illiterate, up dramatically from 19% in 2017.
It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. The miracle that still needs explaining is why anyone, much less the majority of people, would spend their time doing something as difficult, tedious, and isolating as silently reading for the amount of time it would take to carefully read a wordy pamphlet, much less to grapple with a great work of literature.
Let’s repress our inner library-poster about the magic of books. If people aren’t going to read big difficult texts anymore, and that increasingly seems to be the case, and if we do have an intuition that wouldn’t be ideal, then we’re going to have to get a little more realistic about what exactly reading is and why people did it to begin with. We even need to be able to entertain the notion that reading may rightly go the way of the dodo as we invent new technologies to take its place. Why exactly is reading a book better than, say, a bunch of TikToks of roughly the same content? Suspend your disbelief.
Reading crams all five sensory inputs through the eyes, which produces a society that values rational, linear thought. Maybe that seems like a strange claim because you are doing it at this very moment. But, like a violinist trained from early childhood, you don’t recognize the enormous amounts of practice that has gone into the visual fluency that for example instantly transmutes “rotten egg” into a subtle olfactory response. You know on some level that other people are “illiterate” but have mostly forgotten the years of tedious and painfully self-conscious practice. Like a violinist, there are a thousand little movements you learned to make with your psychic “fingers” to silently produce the meaningful sounds of these symbols in your inner theater of imagination. You must deeply internalize the subtle glottal motions to make the sounds of each letter, and layer on top of that the contextual meaning of the combined sounds into words, and layer on top of that the ability to understand all that while composing the words into infinite possible meaningful sentences. You don’t learn all this by focusing on grammar, but on emotional images and stories and then, slowly, you begin to associate those emotions with rules for your particular language’s more granular syntaxes. You can even get away with never consciously learning many of the rules as I, to be frank, still don’t know what the hell present perfect is, but I can presumably still “do” it. These wordy fragments can then form into self-contained chunks like ideals and ideologies, which in some cases can totally detach from their source and float around from one person’s head to another.
So it’s clear that silent reading is hard and recent and mysterious. Much more so than speech, oddly. Children will learn to speak without a whiff of a formal lesson but will almost never learn to read unless you make them. Reading is like looking at the symbols of sheet music and being able to hear it all, from the oboe to the bassoon, in your head. How are you doing that? Not from memory, but being able to make new sounds that you’ve never heard before, in your imagination. As Beethoven went deaf, he relied more and more fully on his previously developed musical literacy to continue to “hear” the music. In fact, arguably his best stuff was written after he went completely deaf and could only work on the piece in his mind’s theatre, which is only possible by assimilating written musical language into an inner soundscape. It is a miracle that so many people had an analogous psychotechnology of silent reading in the modern world. Imagine a world where the majority of people could “hear” written music as well as Beethoven. That was the height of the West’s verbal literacy, at least for a while there. Literate consciousness floated in our air even for the less literate. It built the world as we know it, and why we intuitively fear losing it.
There is the tempting and obvious solution that doesn’t work:
