On reading

Can we read serious books outside serious places?

I hope you are all well and a particular thanks to my two new paying subscribers who joined the elite last week.

I’ve been absolutely hammering this newsletter since September, and have just the one brain, so I think it’s time for a week off.

(I note to my amusement that I took exactly the same calendar week off one year ago).

If you’re really missing my voice this week though, buy my book! I’m inching towards 150 sales.

I don’t like to leave you without a free read, however, so I’ve asked my friend, writer and philosopher Jonathan Nassim, to contribute a guest post below. I recommend signing up to Jon’s ‘Nachlass’, a philosophy Substack, at the link.

Responsa #27

See you all back here next week for normal service.

Cat, Koran, sofa. Photo by the author

I sit down to read on a chair – an armchair – but I cannot concentrate and think that I will only be able to read properly in the bath, I imagine the relaxing hot water of the bath creating a reading inducing atmosphere, in which the vapours and steam and scent of the bath correspond to or engender the ethereal state of mind of the reader alone in a world of thought and imagination; and I think that of course there are some books that can be read only in the bath and this is clearly one of those books that can be read if at all only in the bath – and I literally lol inwardly at the very idea that I could have ever thought that I could have read it in an armchair – and so I enter the bath but as soon as I have entered the bath and open the book I cannot concentrate at all, in fact the vapours and the heat produce too many thoughts that are more vivid than the thoughts presented to me by the book and I immediately imagine being on the sofa and reading on the sofa and think that there are some books that can be read only on the soft-cushioned-material of the sofa in the specific warmth and intimacy of the sofa and I think that I was foolish for ever thinking that a work of this sort could ever be read in the bath at all – of course it could not, and it is doubtful that anyone has ever read this work in the bath for the reasons which I have discovered – and I literally lol out loud at the thought that I could have thought that the bath was ever even a possible venue for a work of this nature, and so I finish with the bath and lie on the sofa and finally open the Koran to begin reading this important work of World Religion – and immediately fall asleep.

When I awake I reflect on the general fact, brought about by this koranic-narcoleptic-scenario, that for certain books of great importance it is very hard to find the appropriate forum to read them – perhaps impossible – given the demands that they place on our attention and the seriousness with which one must take such books.

Perhaps it is for this reason that institutions are set up in order to read particular books, because they can never be read alone, whether in the armchair, the bath or the sofa, but only in a scholarly community of readers and interpreters in an institution designed specifically for reading this book and only this book – and in fact to think that one could read such a book of such a nature without the institution is perhaps a hitherto unknown form of hubris – and so we can call these books institutional books and the reader of them the institutional reader and the institutions in which they are read reading institutions. 

For instance, there are whole reading institutions devoted simply to the reading of the Critique of Pure Reason and nothing else; and other reading institutions devoted only to the reading of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and nothing else; and other institutions solely devoted to the reading of Talmud and nothing else.

And these books could never be read outside these institutions designed solely for the reading of them – not even in what one would imagine to be the optimal reading setting of the bath, preferably containing an Aesop bathing product.

And I reflect further that it is for this reason that the most important books are the books we read least often because we cannot find the right forum nor find the right seat nor the right mental situation to simply read it, whereas the least important books and words we read anywhere and everywhere without a second thought.

Concluding Reflection

And so it is that the least important words constantly enter our brains and the most important words never enter our brains. To read the most important books we appear to have to enter a reading institution for the sole purpose of reading what turns out to be an institutional book, and so we must become institutional readers – with all that that entails. 

Final Questions for Further Reflection

Is it possible to read institutional books without entering into a reading institution and so becoming an institutional reader? Are there techniques for doing this? For instance, could a system of mental work-outs or even mental supplements (herbal or artificial) increase the length and depth of one’s concentration such that over time and incrementally one could read and understand these books outside of the institutions that were designed for reading them – and would this be desirable? 

It may be desirable if we think that the meaning of institutional books is controlled too tightly by reading institutions and their institutional readers, such that liberating the books from these readers and these institutions to which they belong would in fact liberate the very meaning of these books. 

But is this correct, or is their meaning tied to the traditions of reading cultivated only in these institutions and the scholarly apparatus such institutions have constructed around each word of the book the institution is charged to read?

And could it be the case that to remove such a book from the institution to which it belongs is to produce a cacophony of unschooled and infantile interpretations which ruin the intellectual legacy of these great works of thought preserved for humanity only through these reading institutions and the institutional reader?