Written words are cumbersome. They sit silent, inert upon the page. Obtuse black squiggles revealing nothing until we take the effort to read them. Even then, revealing only meaning. Leaving us to decide what to do with it.
Much easier to watch a video, to hear the words sung or read aloud. To heighten or replace meaning with something more tangible. Some pretty layer that leads us through the experience.
But there still remains a joy to wandering—with no flashing lights or gorgeous songs to guide us—through a maze of similar, often confusing and unappealing marks. Hunting, ultimately, for understanding. Why?
When we watch, we observe.
When we read, we think-through.
Writing is inseparable from thought. It is the experience of thought crystallized on the page for the reader to re-experience. A journey the reader re-constructs; and in that act makes their own. Whether it is a story, a series of logical points, or a record of indescribable feeling. All become their own for the reader who decodes them, and become so differently for each reader. In an arcane medley the qualities of the reader and the text combine into a new inseparable construction.
Within that act of construction, the reader takes apart, examines and intelligently incorporates the experiences of the text into their own. Words forming a complex molecule of thought whose pieces can be assembled in and out of sequence, taken as inspiration, or connected into one’s own knowledge, thoughts and feelings. Joining the text’s many pieces and connections intentionally to the much larger molecule of one’s own knowledge and experience of the world. So that in reading we expand our reservoir of experience. Of the things one has thought about and the perspectives one has thought from.
High involvement is what sets reading apart from other media experiences. In activities such as television, the experience continues to happen before us with or without our comprehension. We observe it as it acts upon us. One can think about television—if permitted by its frantic thought-bulldozing pace—but its existence is not dependent on thought. It is sense first and only sometimes thought later.
In reading nothing takes place without our involvement. Not only the highest interpretive ideas but even the smallest details are nothing without the action of the mind. In that action, it is inevitable that the reader will deconstruct, repair, connect, expand and even refute the text. They are free, even forced, to deal with it on their own terms. Taking control of the thought-experience even as they bring it to life. And in that control is a tremendous opportunity for growth. For practicing thought and inhabiting the experience of the text. Using it as a scaffolding to climb to higher heights of thought, feeling, knowledge and experience—to seek out in it new pieces for the construction and improvement of ourselves.
And the more one reads, the more information, connections and interests exist in the mind to be activated. As much as needing practice to interpret words, this makes reading is a self-reinforcing activity and so a tenuous one to pick up.
Yet there are things between the pages of books that can’t be gotten anywhere else. Ways of being and experiencing that go beyond the books and beyond us ourselves; that we have scant other technological means to access. Parts of life that cannot be bought or replicated or mass produced, but that can be conjured by the reader with the right book; and so spun out of nothingness into life.
Critical to all this is that written words are by nature refined. A picture is worth a thousand words and most of them are superfluous. In a few sentences, a description relays the image’s whole role in the context of the thought. Words—especially considered recorded words—reflect the way we experience the world: picking out key assumptions, details, associations and impressions. They do not seek to hold it fast in every detail. Such an attempt would be pointless, laborious, a denial of the essentially mobile and unfixed character of the experience of life. Words instead require the world be organized and interpreted. Just as we do every day. If they fail to do this, they have failed as written words.
In reading, we practice that same considered view of the world. We practice sharpening, organizing, and involvement. We shift from a passive stance towards life to one that takes hold of the world and simultaneously embraces and supersedes our limited view of the world. From a disengaged relationship with our mind to an engaged one.
For the writer, writing is the clarification and exploration of your own thought process. A chance to interrogate and improve your thinking. Whether you write for yourself, or are repackaging your thoughts for another, they emerge clarified. In that clarity a more true, potent and purposeful understanding for the writer and the reader.
To engage with written words is to think and live better—more considered, sharper, intentionally—with a perspective widened by dialog, imagining, and consideration.
Other media can be beautiful, powerful, even thoughtful, but our relation to them is as watcher, listener, audience. Only in reading do we enter inside the experience of living, into the thinking and interpreting of the mind. It is the clearest record of that experience, made clearer by our imagining. Always, we engage, in reading, in a discussion where we question, expand, contextualize and connect the ideas in the text. In that activity, as we fight with and learn from the author, is the opportunity to grow. To feel another’s thought-world and live more fully in our own.