A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read.
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When we pass over into how a knight thinks, how a slave feels, how a heroine behaves, and how an evildoer can regret or deny wrongdoing, we never come back quite the same; sometimes we’re inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched
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When we pass over into how a knight thinks, how a slave feels, how a heroine behaves, and how an evildoer can regret or deny wrongdoing, we never come back quite the same; sometimes we’re inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched. Through this exposure we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts—that we are individuals, but not alone.
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Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts.
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We bring our entire store of meanings to whatever we read—or not.
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Both Proust and Monet used pieces of information to render a composite that made a more vivid impression than if they had created a perfect reproduction.
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Reading is a neuronally and intellectually circuitous act, enriched as much by the unpredictable indirections of a reader’s inferences and thoughts, as by the direct message to the eye from the text.
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[W]hen seemingly complete visual information is given almost simultaneously, as it is in many digital presentations, is there either sufficient time or sufficient motivation to process the information more inferentially, analytically, and critically.
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I stray with these questions. But indeed we stray often when we read. Far from being negative, this associative dimension is part of the generative quality at the heart of reading.
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[T]he changing relationship of readers to text over time can be seen as one index of the history of thought.
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[N]ot only are different pathways utilized by readers of Chinese and English, but different routes can be used within the same brain for reading different types of scripts. And because of the brain’s prodigious ability to adapt its design, the reader can become efficient in each language. Also, efficiency itself is not a binary, “either-or” operation. Japanese researchers find that the same words written in kana, its syllabary system, are read faster than kanji. Therefore, we can see that efficiency may be best conceptualized as a continuum, not the exclusive achievement of an alphabet.
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[W]hat promotes the development of intellectual thought in human history is not the first alphabet or even the best iteration of an alphabet but writing itself.
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[O]nly the examined word and the analyzed thought could lead to real virtue, and only true virtue could lead a society to justice and could lead individuals to their god. In other words, virtue, both in the individual and in society, depended on a profound examination of previous knowledge, and the internalization of its highest principles.
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The inflexible muteness of written words doomed the dialogic process Socrates saw as the heart of education.
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[T]he very process of writing one’s thoughts leads individuals to refine those thoughts and to discover new ways of thinking.
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If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. —PHAEDRUS
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Socrates did not fear reading. He feared superfluity of knowledge and its corollary—superficial understanding.
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[C]hildren this age as egocentric, in the sense that they are constrained by their level of intellectual development to a view of the world as revolving around themselves. It is their gradually evolving ability to think about others’ thinking—not their moral character—that prevents them from being able to know what another person is feeling.
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[H]umans have innate abilities that permit us to store representations of perceptual patterns in our memory and then apply them to each new learning situation. From the start, therefore, children search for invariant features when they try to learn something new.
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Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.
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The dynamic interaction between text and life experiences is bidirectional: we bring our life experiences to the text, and the text changes our experience of life.
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The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection, and with the crime, guilt—and there is the story of mankind. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and a third conquers the world—and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt.
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In music, in poetry, and in life, the rest, the pause, the slow movements are essential to comprehending the whole.
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Humans today do not need to be binary thinkers, and future generations certainly don’t. As an apt Viennese expression puts it, “If two choices appear before you, there’s usually a third.”
