Reading along in My Name Escapes Me, the diary of Alec Guinness, that most subtle and modest of modern actors, I came across Sir Alec’s avowal of his shame at being a slow reader. In his mid eighties, he notes: “I think it stems (apart from slowness of the brain) from the fact that when I come across dialogue in a novel I can’t resist treating it as the text of a play and acting it out, with significant can’t pauses and all.” Ah, thought I, mon semblable, soul brother, as one slow reader to another, I greet you with a salute after the long descent to the bottom of the page.
Alec Guinness’s would be an excellent name to include among the charter members of a Slow Reading Program I have long wanted to start. V. S. Naipaul, who claims one cannot really hope to comprehend more than twenty pages of a serious book in a single day’s reading, would make another good member. Robert Frost, were he alive, would be a third. Frost thoughts fast readers were the poorest readers. They were what he called “eye readers,” whereas the best readers read with both the ear and eye, attentive to the rhythms and sounds — and, I would add, even the shape — of the words.
The Slow Reading Program would be a natural counter to the Evelyn Wood Speed Reading program, about which, it is good to report, these days one hears less and less. (“Sped read my way through Ulysses less night,” the old joke about speed reading has it. “A book about Dublin, isn’t is?”) Speed reading has its place, especially given the burnf that makes up most of our daily reading diet. I use my own version of it to blast through the New York Times in fewer than thirty minutes every morning — obits, cultural chit chat, Clinton scandalogy, letters, Miss Scornucopia (as I think of the columnist Maureen Dowd) — over and out, never breathing heavily.
Otherwise I am a slow reader, almost a slow-motion reader. As Sir Alec has the actor’s tic in reading, so I long ago acquired the editor’s tic. I tend to do a check for error of most of what I read, and I not infrequently find myself, mentally, editing if not rewriting even quite good writers.
In John Updike’s recent Bech at Bay, for example, I felt the following sentence, somehow, needed work: “They had gone, to the same summer camp and private school, come out at the same country-club cotillion, and dropped out of the same year of Oberlin, to marry their respective Republican husbands.” Syntactically, is the placement of “Oberlin” correct; or would it be better to have said “dropped out of Oberlin the same year”? I took two or three minutes to think about this without reaching a firm conclusion.
My reading is slowed down even further by my being a writer. Most reasonably scrupulous people reading a sentence take the following quick inventory: Was it clear? Correct? Precise? Interesting? If they have the least esthetic sense, they will perhaps add, Beautiful? But the writer, when confronted with an interesting or beautiful sentence, must ask two other questions: First, How was it done? Second, How, properly camouflaged, might its magic be stolen for my own writing? This, too, can slow a fellow down.
I also sometimes copy out sentences from my reading, wise or amusing or merely striking ones. “Education is atmosphere,” writes Thomas Mann in his diary. “Since happiness is impossible in this world,” writes Flaubert in a letter, “we must strive for serenity.” I am a sucker for this sort of thing. I lose more time looking up words whose meanings have slipped away from me. The definitions of certain words won’t stay in my mind: fungible, for instance, or irrefragable. Yet even without these minor afflictions — the editor’s tic, the writer’s tic — slow reading seems to me a good idea, at least when the reading matter is stylish and substantial. Like any sensual experience, it ought to be attended to in a carefully paced and thoughtful way.
In the Confessions, St. Augustine has left one of the few prose portraits of a man reading, the man being the excellent Ambrose, bishop of Milan, a potent teacher and one of the most penetrating readers of his day. “When he read,” Augustine writers,
his eyes traveled over the page and his heart sought out the sense. . . . No one was bidden to approach him, nor was it his custom to require that visitors be announced, but when we came to see him we often saw him reading, and always to himself; and after we had sat in long silence, unwilling o interrupt a work on which he was so intent, we would depart again.
Reading is that rare satisfaction, a pleasure that is deep yet happily harmless. While we are doing it we are taken out of ourselves, in the company of people usually smarter than we, building up no bad cholesterol. Why rush it? Why miss the music? Read on — but slowly, dude, slowly.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
