How to Read

I contend that, for the most part, we read like we live our lives.  We make generalizations and then we filter our experiences so that they confirm the generalizations.  Gillett says, “A generalization about life is like a fixed compartment or a square box.  If life does not fit the box, we distort it until it does” (31).  While many generalizations from experience are good and instructive, some generalizations may become extreme and actually limit the believer.  Gillett gives an example of this, showing how a useful generalization might become limiting if it is taken to extremes:

If a boy’s father beat him whenever he spoke out as a child, the generalization that the father is dangerous and that it is probably therefore unwise to speak out in front of him would probably be useful.  It is already a generalization because the father is almost certainly not dangerous in all situations.  Nevertheless it is a reasonable protective assumption.  If however the generalization becomes more extreme, for instance: “Men are dangerous and it is unwise to speak out in front of men in general,” then the boy would begin to distort reality and to limit his choices.  When the generalization becomes more extreme still, for example, “People are dangerous and I will never speak out in front of anybody again,” then he lives with an oppressive illusion and his choices are crippled.  It may affect every relationship with every man for the rest of his life.  Quite automatically he will assume that men are threatening whether they are or not.  He will misinterpret benign expressions as hostile.  He will even find a negative motive for a kind action: “He only gave me that because he wants to control me.”  In short, he cannot see reality because it is distorted by his belief (34-5).

Similarly, when we read, we become readers who “know how to read.”  After the beginner’s mind (more on what this is soon!) wanes and wears thin, we read generalizations into the text that correspond to our beliefs, and then we push the text to fit this contrivance.  We come to both life and texts with satchels of generalizations and stereotypes hanging from us.  There are the ones that come from our given culture and country (or cultures and countries), from our school and education,  from our class, from and about gender, about body image, wealth, power, about aging and death, just to name a few.  We use this information to confirm or justify our relationship to the text, which is often something that we decided long before we ever opened the front cover.  We participate while we swear up and down that we are merely observing. 

How to Read a Book, the 1970s revised version of the 1940 bestseller, explains in plain language exactly what the title says.  Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren explain in detail the different levels of reading that exist (which they define as Elementary, Inspectional, Analytical, and Syntopical), and offer practical information on different ways to read.  The book explains the activity and the art of reading—how to “come to terms with an author” by understanding their use of terminology, how to determine an author’s message, how to criticize a book “fairly,” how to agree or disagree.  How to Read a Book might be seen as a book explaining what to do with the information in a book, how to relate to a text, and even how to manipulate the text according to your own needs.  They outline a few concrete ways to configure the elements involved in reading.  I think that Adler and Van Doren’s exploration of what one should do when one reads offers a compelling springboard from which to launch my own suggestions of what might be done when one reads.

Reading as an adult is not often an exercise in discovery.  It frequently becomes little more than a way to affirm what we already “know” of the world.  We choose our genre of choice—news journalism, juicy romance, detective thriller, celebrity tabloid, comic book, instruction manual, academic journal—and we approach the text with a pretty good idea of what to expect, and what not to expect, from it.  We do not anticipate finding spiritual nourishment, for example, in Cosmopolitan magazine, and we do not imagine finding a new hairstyle, for example, writ into the stories of the bible.  We anticipate new information from reading, but we generally expect for literatures to stay true to genre. These expectations create the circumstances where we are hardly ever disappointed, perhaps because we ourselves are disabling other possibilities.

 Adler and Van Doren illustrate this phenomenon, seeing it as reading to gain information rather than understanding.

There is the book; and here is your mind.  As you go through the pages, either you understand perfectly everything the author has to say or you do not.  If you do, you may have gained information, but you could not have increased your understanding.  If the book is completely intelligible to you from start to finish, then the author and you are as two minds in the same mold.  The symbols on the page merely express the common understanding you had before you met (7).

The majority of reading that most of folks do in everyday life is this one, reading to gain information.  This type of reading “is at once thoroughly intelligible to us” (9).  We are not fumbling in the language, or struggling with meaning.  They explain, “Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started.  Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth” (9).

Adler and Van Doren make a distinction between reading from which one gains information and reading from which one gains understanding. 

Let us take our second alternative.  You do not understand the book perfectly. Let us even assume—what unhappily is not always true—that you know enough to know that you do not understand at all.  You know the book has more to say than you understand and hence that it contains something that can increase your understanding (7).

The authors reveal that what they are calling “understanding” is really an analytical frame or paradigm, something that might “throw a new and perhaps more revealing light on all the facts he [the reader] knows” (9). In this second sense of reading, reading to gain understanding or to possibly reframe our existing understanding, the book has “more to say” than the reader can comprehend.  Adler and Van Doren point to an inequality between the author and the reader as a prerequisite of such reading.   

Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader.  The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding.  Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing.  Here by “learning” is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess (9).

Adler and Van Doren ask a valid question- what to do with these texts you can’t understand?

What do you do then?  You can either take the book to someone else who, you think, can read better than you, and have him explain the parts that trouble you. (“He” may be a living person or another book—a commentary or textbook) (7).  Or, instead of enlisting the help of others, Adler and Van Doren suggest “doing the job of reading that the book requires” (8).  This is accomplished in only one manner.

Without external help of any sort, you go to work on the book.  With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more.  Such elevation, accomplished by the mind working on a book, is highly skilled reading, the kind of reading that a book which challenges your understanding deserves (8, their emphasis).

I am particularly intrigued by this second type of reading that they suggest.  In it there is just the reader and the text working with and on each other.  This suggests becoming an active and mindful participator with the book.  In a sense, the reader becomes the co-creator of the text.  We are invited by the text to cast off our usual way of thinking about things, in order to meet the book wherever it is.  Rather than casting our net of generalizations over the book, we let it fly free.   And as the text soars about the landscape, we are free to choose who we are in relationship to the soaring text, what we are going to do about it, or with it, if anything.  I am interested in what we can do in these readings Adler and Van Doren recommend.  How can we read in such a way that reading enables us to get to know ourselves?  What would have to change about reading itself in order to create these different readings? Can we attempt to rearrange the elements of reading, as Colás suggests, to activate new possibilities? 

I believe that reading in a different way will produce different readings, ones that do not necessarily reinforce stereotypes and reiterate damaging social meta-narratives, ones that might invite us to challenge and question our limiting views of ourselves and the world.  Thus, reading becomes an exercise in freedom and an invitation to power.  There is a way in which we can read texts “to live” as Colás asserts in his work.  There is a way in which we can read texts not to dissect them or manipulate them to prove a point, but rather to learn tools for life.  These tools can range from the practical to the esoteric, from the mundane to the spiritual. 

These readings also engender new ways of knowing, moving the notion of “knowing” out of our heads and into our bodies, growing there to embody the understanding that Adler and Van Doren describe.  I call these alternative ways of knowing “feminine” or “Yin,” because they call on more subtle and indirect understandings that are very different from what we often consider “knowing” or “knowledge.”    Far from an essentialist reiteration of cultural stereotype, I draw from the Eastern concept of “the feminine” as a necessary energetic force bound to and interdependent with its male counterpart.  Gloria Karpinski is an author who is very much in touch with forms of Yin knowing.  She will describe a vision she had while meditating, or even intentionally “take” a subject into meditation and report on her findings.  She trusts herself as a vessel of knowledge.  One of the big myths of Western culture is that knowledge comes from outside the body; her work confounds that idea and encourages others to do so as well. 

I define Yin knowledge as knowledge or information that comes from the inside out, whereas masculine or Yang knowledge goes from the outside in.  Thus, Yin knowledge would be found in intuition, dreams, experiential knowing, embodiment, and various other forms or directives that come from within the individual.  Yin knowledge can also come out of the individual in different forms, such as poetry, myth, art, and symbols.  Yin knowledge, for me, encapsulates the many alternative ways of knowing that fall—like the black swirl in the yin/yang symbol—into darkness and outside of normative ways of knowing.  Yang knowledge, by contrast, includes what we are told, what we read, and various other directives that come from outside of the individual.  Gloria Karpinski defines Yang knowledge in Barefoot on Holy Ground as “specificity, knowledge, hierarchy, dominance, and possession, extremes that led to separations from each other and the earth” (43).  The construction of “knowing” is more often than not Yang—rational, linear, dichotomous thought—and it is privileged and maintained through more widespread and/or more deeply engrained cultural frames.  These frames are upheld through interpersonal relationship to and communication of an ideology that seems to breed a climate of fear.  More subtle experiential or extra-linguistic ways of knowing are given little currency because they can’t be accurately transmitted from within this framework, and the corporate/academic culture makes it feel risky to try to work beyond the existing frames.

Both masculine and feminine knowledge are ever-present in balanced amounts in everything, though we might not always perceive that fact.  Karpinski explains the specifics of the relationship between Yin and Yang.  She writes that “The Taoists describe the movements within wholeness as yin (feminine) and yang (masculine).  The one is always in process of becoming the other.  We are not one or the other; rather we are both.  Yin and yang are movements of energies, not identities” (53).  Margo Anand confirms this, “Each of us has an Inner Man that is associated with dynamic, active energy; with setting and achieving goals; and with getting things done.  This is what the Taoists call the Yang aspect of our nature—the engaged, noncontemplative self.  And each of us also has an Inner Woman, a natural capacity for letting things happen, for going with the flow of life without setting goals, for relaxing and being playful.  This is what the Taoists call the Yin aspect of our nature—the contemplative, intuitive, communing self.”  If we want to read holistically, we must approach wholeness by reading in a way that incorporates the feminine as well as the masculine.  Karpinski reminds us that “This [is] but an outer dramatization of the collective inner drama, a drama that is neither male or female but human” (43).

Part of the difficulty we have been having with introducing feminine paradigms is that we have been attempting to use masculinist frames and masculinist lenses to perceive feminine knowledge.  We strive to capture multiplicity, simultaneity, and interdependence within a system of linear and dichotomous classifications.  This is similar to seeing an iridescent-blue-and-black butterfly pinned to cork in a display case.  If we think that we can “know” the butterfly by observing it in the case, we are missing out on most of its story.  We have no idea of its starts as a caterpillar, of the goings-on inside the cocoon.  We don’t know what it’s like to see a butterfly in an open field.  We don’t even know that it flies (though we might assume so based on wing-size and other assessments).   Feminine ways of knowing, by contrast, are engendered primarily through experience. 

Certain practices help to cultivate Yin knowledge.  Two of these elements are beginner’s mind and mindfulness meditation, which draw the attention inward and widen the lens so that we might see holistically.  The way of reading I am advocating—and practicing—in this book takes the usual elements of reading and combines with them the practice of mindfulness meditation and the practice of creative expression, which often puts us in touch with our beginner’s mind.  By cultivating different practices, we can know things in a different way.  Practice in this case becomes a revolutionary tool because it is reiterative and re-inscriptive.  One key to personal and global change is cultivating a regularly recurring practice that corresponds to and confirms what one wants to see existing in the future, whether that thing be world peace or a new car.  This is a literal spin on Gandhi’s words, “Be the change that you want to see in the world.”  I am not proposing that we abandon other ways of reading entirely.  Rather, I am advocating some people sometimes trying something different, ostensibly, reading such that the text is a mirror that reflects ourselves back to ourselves, reading as a journey of self-exploration.

One of the reasons I am advocating for a different method of reading is because I believe that reading books gives us an opportunity safely and intimately examine our beliefs.  Books can take us all around the world, deep into different cultures, often seen through the eyes of someone possessing a completely different belief system.  They can also take us into the deeper inner workings of lives of people we see as “like us.”  The most interesting thing that we encounter when we read is not the “other,” but ourselves.  Through our judgments, likes, dislikes, thoughts and emotions—all of which often come out during reading—we are able to get a firmer grasp on what it is that we believe.  Like the meditation cushion, reading can create a safe haven in which our thoughts and actions cannot harm another, but can be explored.  I truly believe that the combination of reading and meditation might engender some very different understandings of the self.