How to Tame Twitchiness

On the Solace of Old Books

Oct 13, 2023

*Scroll*, Allegra Villarreal, hand-drawn digital illustration, 2023.

There is a growing sub-genre of books on my shelf that can best be labeled as “reading-about-reading.” I have spent so much of my career coaxing students to like books, to enjoy reading, that I never had time to interrogate my own reading habits and how they’ve changed over time.

These days, I’m giving a lot more thought to reading as a practice of attention. An antidote to the twitchiness of modern life. I’m in the middle of reading Maryanne Wolf’s Reader Come Home and she makes a convincing case for how digital platforms are altering our way of engaging with the written word—probably forever. What does it mean to “come home” to reading in the ways I did as a younger person? Before incessant pings and content overload? I didn’t quite finish it in time for this month’s “Book Notes” but it’s a lovely companion text to Alan Jacob’s Breaking Bread with the Dead which arrives as a similar conclusion from a different set of premises. He argues that the key to a “tranquil mind” lies in our ability to expand our “temporal bandwidth”—that is, to learn the evergreen lessons of humanity as a balm for our modern aches.

As always, if you like these “Book Notes,” you may want to look up some more I’ve done on my website.

1️⃣ Sentence Synopsis

Jacobs argues that engaging meaningfully with the writings of the past – the strange, the uncomfortable, the profound – can help ease the anxieties of modern life.

🖼️ Contexts

I picked this up on a Barnes and Noble summer run a couple of years ago, looking for books to freshen up some lectures on introducing literary analysis. I ended up sitting in the aisle, reading the first 20 pages of this book, and knew I should probably buy it (even though it wasn’t particularly suited for the task at hand). It’s a good read, and a solid argument, for reading widely in the face of uncertain times. There are also an inordinate amount of research-breadcrumbs and intriguing anecdotes that are woven into the crisp, engaging prose (see “Brain Tickles” below for a selection).

🔑 Key Takeaways

It is important to see the past for its “treasures more than its threats” – and that these “treasures” can guide us in an age of information overload, social acceleration, and algorithmic marketing.
“Informational triage” is a modern necessity – the ability to quickly filter through massive amounts of information so we can be “ruthless” in how we “deploy our attention.” And part of our strategy should be to read the “classics.”
The key to a tranquil mind is increasing “personal density” – a term coined by Thomas Pynchon – that is “directly proportional to temporal bandwidth”. Our connectedness to the ancient, and the perspective in lends, are vital to increasing density so we can transcend the moments of our newsfeeds to ground ourselves in a “bigger time.”
Young people and children should be exposed to older art and that for which they are not the intended audience so that they can “find value and pleasure in something that wasn’t necessarily made for them.”
Encountering texts from the past is a relatively non-threatening way to engage with difference, especially that which runs counter to our current sensibilities.

💯 Strong Lines

On using the classics to future-cast: “To read old books is to get an education in possibility for next to nothing.”
On reading and identification: “…power arises in some cases from likeness—from the sense that that could be me speaking—and from difference—that is someone very different from me speaking. For mental and moral health we need both.”
On our instinctive responses to what we read: “This testing of our responses against those of our ancestors is an exciting endeavor – a potentially endless table conversation, though, again, one we can suspend at any time….As Leslie Jamison says, that tension crackles and sparks. And the sparks produce both light and warmth.”

🧠 Brain Tickles

Climate change, as a theme, is relatively rare in contemporary fiction (Amitav Ghosh’s observation from The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable); while “cli-fi” does exist, it usually looks dystopically to the future rather than dealing with the here and now.
Julian Baggini’s argument to read the past – and controversial thinkers such as Kant and Hume – with an understanding that “none of these figures had the good fortune to be confronted with eloquent proponents of opposing views.” And, this in turn, should make us all the more admiring of other thinkers – Wollstonecraft and Douglass, for example – who were able to cut their way through thickets of convention that “so reliably trap ordinary folks—and sometimes even great geniuses.”
Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Generous Thinking, a book that argues for “generosity as an enduring habit of mind, a conversational practice.” I think it might connect nicely to Kline’s Time to Think.
Loving the aside on futurists (pg. 144) in the discussion of Wendell Barry’s “Standing by Words” (1980) where he compares them to the “projectors” of Gulliver’s Travels: “… men who appear to be meaningfully related to the future, but are in fact wholly self-absorbed….Their imagined world is devoid of actual persons and much of the rest of creation as well.” The key distinction is between projecting and promising: “The ‘projecting’ of ‘futurologists’ uses the future as the safest possible context for whatever is desired; it binds one to selfish interest. But making a promise binds one to someone else’s future.”

🍎 Ideas and Excerpts for Teaching and Learning

There are a lot of anecdotes and excerpts that feel relevant to teaching; here are a sampling:

Italo Calvino’s concept of “your classics” – books that take on a particular status for a particular reader…Jacobs defines it further, “…a book becomes a classic for you in part because of its power to compel you to hear something that you not only hadn’t thought but might not believe, or might not want to belief. In this sense a book can become very much like a friend.”
The discussion of Plutarch’s comparative studies model (in his case, of Roman and Greek military figures) that provided an educational framework for the whole of Western Europe for centuries.
Patrocinio Schweickart’s “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading” and the recommendation of looking for a “utopian moment” or “authentic kernel” where something deeply beautiful and human emerges even in the midst of patriarchal muck.
The extended discussion of Seamus Heaney’s “Sandstone Keepsake” at the beginning of chapter 9 would make a lovely mini-lesson on poetic allusions.
The discussion (pp. 154-155) of Paul Kingsnorth’s describing his visit to the Salon Noir, and asking questions that might be asked of any text, artifact or work of art:
Why did these people, some fifteen thousand years ago, paint animals, and paint them with such (apparently) loving attention? What was the world, to them, and what spirits haunted it? What stories did they tell about their place here, about the past and the present? Who, what, did they think they were?
Niccolò Machiavelli on the solace of ancient texts:
“When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and, decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.”
See you next Friday!