The Forgotten Art of Reading

During the early stages of my formative years, I have always wondered how people derived such immense pleasure from reading books. To my puerile intellect it seemed that they were nothing more than recycled wood that bore bleak sentences strung together for pretentious individuals who simply wanted to project themselves as intellectuals.No one in my vicinity had sought to reconstitute this primitive definition of mine and I naively assumed that the entirety of knowledge was fully encapsulated by the academic subjects I was taught. That the preoccupation of reading a book was just another prerogative of the aristocracy I had to confront with profound indifference.

Therefore the constricted horizons I possessed came to pre-eminently characterize the seemingly diverse perspectives I presumed to uphold. Although my contemporary perceptions indicated that my opinions were relatively novel, in retrospect I can hardly discern any distinctive element from what seems now to be incoherent fragments of a thoughtless meandering. Since my intellectual life had been wholly confined to the strictly academic environment my school had to offer, I seldom felt the need to pursue any curiosities I might have harboured outside the regular scholastic enterprise. Like most of my peers I had been completely persuaded that an educational institution is the only place that could efficiently facilitate true learning and any other mode of acquisition was bound to end in miserable failure.

In spite of being intensely passionate about ideas all my life, I only understood the ineffable significance of reading a book years later when one of my acquaintances unwittingly instilled a deep seated appreciation for arcane literature. It was only then I realised there’s much more to this ostensibly insipid process of assimilating information than what meets the eye.

It is no overstatement to say that I was opened to an enormous world of awe and sheer wonder when I first acquired the wisdom necessary to penetrate into the true essence of an object that I had heretofore regarded with remarkable callousness. What I had so far conceived as a prosaic human artifice concocted for the entertainment of a pronounced minority seemed to conceal a nature far more interesting than I had ever presumed before. Strangely however, my initial amazement was not so much directed at the peculiar qualities I perceived to be emanating from a book as how I had managed to stay oblivious towards something for so long that now seemed positively magical.

I was naturally inclined to attribute my cause of ignorance to the kind of deprived environment my school had assiduously strived to foster but soon realized it would be dishonest if I were to do that exclusively. But regardless of what might have contributed to the stark indifference that was now utterly shattered by this newfound experience, a book that once fared as a pale object compared to other modes of acquisition seemed to transcend all prior representation I ascribed to it. Although its constituent elements were made of nothing but ink and paper mostly bound together by a thicker version of the latter, its experiential significance far outweighed any assumptions one would make solely from its objective properties. And a closer examination of what might constitute this significance yielded a richer store of knowledge than I had ever hoped to glean from what I had long reckoned as a mere manifestation of utter bleakness.

I eventually realised that a book unlike what I had supposed before could be best conceptualized as a gateway into the minds of various authors as opposed to a static representation intended to communicate stale ideas. It is much more akin to an ingenious instrument people have devised to circumscribe parts of themselves into an objective entity that anyone could access as long as he possessed the literary prowess to comprehend it. And this entity is often a product of profound deliberations on the subject it wishes to expound and usually bears an unmistakable relationship with books of a similar nature. This relationship that appeared to weave together the entire corpus of knowledge was perhaps the most striking quality that I recognised to be a part of a book.

No matter how idiosyncratic an author’s opinion seemed to be I noticed that it almost unerringly contained remnants of some other author who shared similar aspirations. Among the more esoteric kind, the writers were capable of making connections across extremely diverse domains of knowledge that it was uncanny how they were capable of divining such brilliant ideas whilst giving the impression of expending no intellectual effort whatsoever. But amidst these feelings of admiration and incredulity, I also seemed to recognise a qualitative shift in my mode of learning that I had never anticipated. With every book that I read in order to extricate myself from the intellectual ignorance that constantly plagued me, I slowly began to realise that a sufficient understanding of an author’s publication necessitated a subtle comprehension of the entire corpus from which he derived much of his ideas. Thus it seemed to me that I was conceptually obligated to acquaint myself with a much larger framework of knowledge than what the book had actually curtailed if I was to understand the seemingly isolated work in all its entirety.

The former discovery, notwithstanding its antithetical nature to the ideals on specialized learning I had entertained so far, seemed to elicit a deeper reflection into the very structure of knowledge which I had paid scant attention to in the course of my academic endeavours. Thereby what had merely started as a resuscitation of some latent propensity that had long remained buried furnished an uncommon rumination about the framework of ideas themselves that one seldom heeds to in the course of his formal education.

Unlike what I had normally expected to obtain from conscientiously reading books, the ideas that I assimilated unexpectedly rendered me cognizant to a complex dynamic of relationships that connected all the different realms of the intellectual enterprise. And this interconnectedness that I perceived, furthermore, seemed to profoundly influence the choice of my next read which consequently produced an organic growth of the knowledge I amassed every single time I completed a literary work. As a consequence of this strange developmental process, the initial aspirations I had harboured for the hard sciences slowly enlarged upon a wider frontier that also encapsulated a significant part of the humanities.

Starting from a subject that one usually considers to be completely divorced from the social sciences, I inadvertently found myself in the abysmal depths of philosophy and psychology through a relentless pursuit of the aforementioned theoretical link. The strict demarcation of academic disciplines that I had grown accustomed to seemed to be an ineffective method of education in light of these observations for the mechanical incorporation of a set of facts is far inferior to an acquisitional process that predominantly relied on the pursuit of unmitigated curiosity.It seemed to me that this mode of learning could easily dispense with the boredom that one usually encounters in the canonical method inasmuch as he finds an axis through which he can connect various disciplines with his own domain of curiosity. An axis that I myself had come to discover simply by reading.

These reflections however did not in the least prompt me to completely deplore the concept of specialized learning but rather seemed to suggest that confining ones orientation to a constricted domain of knowledge can profoundly hamper the development of one’s character in all its entirety. Ever since Adam Smith first proposed his ideas on the division of labour, the concept of specialization has increasingly disseminated itself over all the facets of human life. The social machinery that we have constructed as a consequence seems to be extremely efficient in furthering the material well being of its exponents but does that unmistakably entail the success of specialization in all its different realms of application?

In spite of the fact that our educational institutions produce individuals of remarkable competence in their respective fields, they are still nonetheless characterized by a general imbecility when construed outside their domains of expertise. Latent qualities and tendencies that might contribute to a natural appraisal of the world is left unheeded since the road to economic prosperity could simply be paved by performing one particular task exceptionally well. This proposition nonetheless does not imply aspiring to the unachievable ideal of mastering all disciplines simultaneously but that one should always seek knowledge not as a means to an end but as an end in itself. The unquenchable thirst for wisdom and truth that we observe in children is ruthlessly suppressed so that one might impose a systematic form of edification that seems more befitting in a complex world but this I am afraid is achieved at the great peril of their individual curiosity. Although it is indispensable to eventually choose a primary academic venture that one might pursue throughout the course of his life, it is also equally necessary to retain a generally inquisitive nature which constitutes the very essence of being human. But how exactly should one go about doing this?

It is when I attempted to answer this predicament that I fully realised the stupendous importance of the forgotten art of reading. The reason I suppose a book can ideally foster and even recuperate this dormant curiosity that every individual invariably conceals is because the former is often a culmination of some comprehensive investigation that spans a wide range of the human enterprise. Any book that speaks to the soul of an individual must always contain this element of generality for it is precisely this that unites the diversity of human interest in all its multitude of manifestations. Every endeavour that people have undertaken from time immemorial has always been dedicated to the furtherance of this interest regardless of the formidable tribulations that it might entail. Thus it seemed to me that the gift of inquiry which man has been fortunately endowed with was the most salient quality that characterized him and from which all of our creative pursuits inexorably derived their profuse vitality. The reason our forebears were even remotely capable of erecting this monumental civilization that we take for granted is because of their unshakeable resolve to venture forth into the treacherous lands of the unknown whose ambivalent nature makes it simultaneously a source of great promise and unprecedented threat. This fidelity for their own individual nature that was single-handedly responsible for all our great accomplishments was not borne out of material avarice or from the ignoble satisfaction of being superior to one’s fellow peers. It was rather a consequence of an inexplicable feeling of contentment they obtained from seeking something that they believed to be immensely meaningful. A meaning that they had come to discover within their own hearts for the things that we most need are often found in places we are least likely to look.