Slow reading - Writers at rest

The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Slow reading
Writers at rest

Bill Gates periodically takes a reading retreat. He chooses his books and goes somewhere or stays home. He shuts out the world and sinks long and deep into reading. This retreat is revitalizing. Getting away, and reading what he otherwise wouldn’t have time for, Gates returns to work refreshed and more able to encounter new challenges. (Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From discusses the importance of Gates’s reading vacations.) Gates regularly posts the books he’s read, and comments on them; among the most recent are Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011), and Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012). “That’s for me,” I thought, when I learned about Gates’s reading vacations.

There’s a scene in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) in which a woman checks into a hotel to read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. She’s in crisis; she’s trying to be a good mother but she’s unfulfilled in her traditional marriage. When I first read the novel, I was struck by her need to escape to a hotel to read without interruption.

I’d had two small children and raised them while I started writing. I’d read scores of books while I cared for them. But for years, I’d read a paragraph, then tend to a crying baby; I’d read a chapter, then organize my children to go to the park; I’d read a few pages, then peel some potatoes for supper. It was in and out of reading every time I read. I hadn’t experienced that luxury of falling into reading since childhood, when I’d go to the library in summer, check out a pile of books, sit on my family’s back porch, and read to my heart’s content.

Henry Miller’s The Books in My Life underscores the importance of reading for writers. Miller thought it was important for us to read slowly: “How much better and wiser it would be,” he writes, “how much more instructive and enriching, if we proceeded at a snail’s pace! What matter if it took a year, instead of a few days, to finish the book?” Miller took a year to read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), spending time with the novel “as with a living person,… I might even say.”

Miller believed that the “way one reads a book is the way one reads life.” That is, if we read haphazardly and inattentively, that’s how we live our lives, that’s how we write. Learning to read slowly and attentively can help us live more fully realized lives and can help our work.

Reading, for Miller, is a “fecundating” experience, intimately connected to the act of writing: “Drunk with ecstasy, one returns to his own work revivified.” For Miller every act of writing begins with reading. Miller’s reading was voracious and idiosyncratic. Although he left City College because he was forced to study Spenser’s Faerie Queene, reading meant the world to him. He read Jean Giono, H. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, Greek drama, Rimbaud, Rabelais. He believed reading was “an act of creation” because unless a writer has an “enthusiastic reader … a book would die.” By reading slowly, carefully, and with complete attention, Miller believed, we respect the writer’s work and enrich our lives.

Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot, has described how, in college, he read “the great modernists. Joyce, Proust, Faulkner.” Soon he and his friends “were reading Pynchon and John Barth.” His generation, he says, were “weaned on experimental writing before ever reading much of … nineteenth-century literature.”

But when Eugenides was in his early twenties, he “read Tolstoy for the first time,” and learned about a different form of narration. He learned that he preferred the “clarity of Tolstoy … and the vividness and lifelikeness of his characters” to the “cerebration … [and] the play of language” in Joyce. Taking time to read Tolstoy with care and attention eventually led Eugenides to “attempt to reconcile these two poles of literature, the experimentalism of the modernists and the narrative drive and centrality of character of the nineteenth-century realists” in his work.

A few weeks ago, I decided to take a reading retreat. I was going away to a remote location, cut off from the outside world, and I could look forward to two solid weeks of reading. I’d gotten an iPad. And although I still love to read conventional books (especially in the bathtub), I wanted to take several books away. Among the books I downloaded were Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and The Sun Also Rises; Ian McEwan, Atonement; Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948); Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man (2009).

Throughout those two weeks, I settled into a few hours of reading in the morning, a few hours in the afternoon, and an hour in the evening. I read about five hours a day, every day. There were no interruptions—no telephone, no e-mail, no Internet. I stopped reading when I wanted to, not when I had to.

By the end of the first week, I felt as if I’d found the reader in myself I’d lost many years ago. The reader who wept over a passage. Who laughed out loud. Who circled back to the beginning of a book to start it all over again. Who marveled at the brilliance of a phrase, of a sentence, of a long stretch of writing. Who sat and stared at the sky in astonishment, recalling something wondrously written. I read Hemingway as if I’d never read him before; I read Hall for the first time and was humbled by the brilliance of her work.

Sure, I itched to write. What writers don’t when they’re reading something skilled? But I promised myself I wouldn’t write, at least not for my project. But I wrote long meandering appreciations of what I read. I noted what I wanted to remember. And, like Miller, I copied long passages into my notebook—copying, I’ve learned, is a superb way of slowing down reading, of noticing how a writer’s sentences work.

I wish I’d had conventional books with me for the tactile pleasure of holding a book, of turning a page. But still, the time I spent reading was everything I’d hoped for, and much more. “What a privilege it is to do this,” I thought. And I came home eager to reengage my work. Though reading is part of my life’s work, during those two weeks, I relearned how to really read. To read the way we were meant to read. Slowly, carefully, with respect and attention.

Miller has written that if we fear we’ll neglect our “duties by reading leisurely and thoughtfully, by cultivating [our] own thoughts,” we’ll neglect our “duties anyway, and for worse reasons.” When I returned home, I vowed to continue to read without interruption. For if we don’t read slowly and carefully, and choose, instead, a life filled only with obligations, Miller believes we’ll miss the possibility of living “a new life, [filled with] new fields of adventure and exploration.”