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Dr Brainerd Prince
Director, CTLC and Associate Professor, Plaksha University
Both civilizational and family cultures play a critical part in determining fundamental behaviour patterns from childhood. Civilisations and families that encourage or even mandate conversations, reading, doing manual work, or sports will produce humans who excel in these various domains. These behavioural habits become 'native' to those who indulge in them from childhood. The culture of reading has become normative in cultures where it has been disciplined and mandated as required good behaviour. But for those civilisations and cultures that have sidestepped reading, perhaps a little inspiration is required to bring it back on the table, literally, and establish it as important as food that we need to eat to live. Moreover, in our age of GenAI where we are harnessing it to 'read' for us, this call to traditional deep reading is of vital importance.
I am reminded of two strange texts from the Bible, one from the Old Testament and the other from the New Testament, both revealing the power of reading.
Ezekiel 3: 1-4 “Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the people of Israel.” So I opened my mouth, and he gave me the scroll to eat. Then he said to me, “Son of man, eat this scroll I am giving you and fill your stomach with it.” So I ate it, and it tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth. He then said to me, “Son of man, go now to the people of Israel and speak my words to them."
Revelations 10: 8-11 “Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel..." He said, "Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.” I took the little scroll and ate it. It tasted as sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, “You must prophesy [speak] again about many peoples, nations, languages and kings.”
These two strange passages possess a deep metaphorical insight about reading that (a) places texts on a high pedestal, (b) reading as an important activity and discipline and (c) powerful transformative speech as the impact of deep reading.
1. The first insight lies in recognising texts, I mean written texts, as food. This is a powerful metaphor. Food feeds our body and grows it. Texts feed our mind and spirit and grow them. Food security is a primary objective of all households; to an extent, our primary objective of working and doing labour is to provide food on the table for the family. What about intellectual food? I don't think we see texts as intellectual food without which there could be stunted growth and even death of the mind. Then there are texts and there are texts! Some texts have prevailed over the ages like The Bhagwad Gita, The Quran, Aristotle and Plato's texts, The Upanishads, and many more, purely because of the semantic density they bear. The weight of their meaning and their ageless insights for the deep things of life have kept these texts alive. They have provided and continue to provide direction to millions of people over the ages. And then some texts have bitten the dust and disappeared from collective memory because their articulations were merely mirroring the gossip of their age with no weighted insight.
2. The second insight is about the activity of reading. How do we read if our very life and growth depend on it? You can gulp your food down, which is equivalent to misplaced cursory reading, and get a stomach ache, or you can chew and even ruminate, allowing the engagement of enzymes for effective digestion. This requires a slight slowness in the activity of reading texts, for internalisation and proper understanding to be formed. Nietzsche uses the metaphor of 'rumination', like a cow, for the slow digestive process of reading, something he claims modern man is incapable of doing. I want to take this moment to comment on using GenAI for reading. If you are reading a text in its entirety, then you get an understanding of the whole text. If you are reading a summary or review of it, then you will get an understanding of the summary you have read. Now, this is not something that is new. All of us were trained to read reviews of books before deciding to invest in reading the entire book. But all reviews were not equal; the academic credentials of the reviewer were as important as the author of the book reviewed for the review to be taken seriously. The difference here is that we trust a machine source, which is prone to hallucinations. There are other complex differences between GenAI's reviews and expert human reviews. But that is for another day.
3. Finally, what effect does reading a text produce? It produces a bittersweet effect in us. It is sweet to the mouth, in a sense, a sense of awe and a gasping of breath when we first discover the new ideas through reading, but then it turns bitter or sour in the stomach, meaning the idea's power of critique and argument and the probable hardness of its demands on us. Ricoeur tells us that the texts make a demand on us and put forth a call for our submission and obedience to their mandate. True reading is following the direction of the text and submitting to its mandate on us, which brings about our transformation and gives us a voice to transform the world. Texts possess a double-edged sword - they transform their readers and, through them, transform the world. No wonder governments ban certain books that can bring out an undesired transformation. This is yet another proof of the transforming power of texts.Das Kapitalis one book, and yet at its height of influence in the 1980s, it commanded a followership of one-third of the world's population - a staggering 1.7 billion people lived under its leadership.
If this is the power of reading texts, then it can neither be delegated nor traded, and the hard work it demands from us must be given to it. In forming this habit lies true transformation, both of ourselves and the world we seek to impact.
