Growing through books | WELT

The summer months offer many people the opportunity to spend more time reading. The days are longer, the weather is warmer, the ice clinks in the lemonade glasses. And even for those who don’t have the schedule of a school teacher (for whom there are supposedly three reasons to enter the profession: June, July and August), a sense of relaxation often sets in as people go on vacation trips or simply take a break from their regular jobs. Ironically, however, many of us are conditioned to read with a highly active mind, which can take some of the joy out of reading.

On the first pages of a classic book about reading How to read a book, Authors Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren devote half a dozen pages to active reading, ultimately admitting that while reading for pleasure is sometimes acceptable, that purpose of reading is not the focus of their book. Unfortunately, this focus on an active mind can result in reading becoming a chore in most cases. Active reading becomes a sort of bridge troll, requiring readers to pay the learning toll before they can continue on their journey.

I am drawing on CS Lewis and would like to advocate a kind of passive reading. In his preface to The discarded image (published posthumously in 1964)Lewis offers his published lectures on medieval and Renaissance literature as an alternative “method of discovery.” It is common, says Lewis, for readers to turn to commentators, history books, and encyclopedias for help when they encounter difficult passages in their reading, but this method seems unsatisfactory to many because such scholarship “requires an ever-increasing out of literature itself.”

Lewis’ goal for The discarded image is to offer those who are interested in literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance an “outfit” for reading in advance as a way to lead them in such literature. Ideally, this methodological shift ensures that readers have fewer interruptions when they encounter written works. Lewis uses the negative example of a hiker’s constant staring at a map – an intellectually “active” way of traveling, to be sure, but a practice that “destroys the ‘wise passivity’ with which one should enjoy a landscape.”

As is Lewis’ habit, he does not cite his source for the expression “wise passivity”, but the source is William Wordsworth’s poem “Expostulation and Reply,” First printed in Lyrical balladshis 1798 collection of poems, also written in collaboration with his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth’s poem imagines a conversation between himself and a friend who chides him for spending his time by a lake when he could be actively browsing through books for wisdom.

It is a paradox of growth that we cannot fully develop our own lives without making an honest effort to live the lives of others vicariously.

Wordsworth’s answer is that our senses and other powers act on us without our needing to demand meaning from them. They act on us “of themselves,” whether we seek their influence or not: “We may feed our minds / In a wise passivity.” We should note that passivity is not a good thing in itself, but it must be paired with wisdom to be of any use. Of course, parents should monitor their children’s entertainment habits (and their own), and they should do so closely. Because the disarming power of well-written books, especially fiction. But a “wise passivity” is not absolutely passive. Just as there is wisdom in a passivity that remains open and receptive to the power and pleasure of books, there can also be a foolishness in excessive intellectual activity that takes the joy out of reading.