Neither is the primary act of scanning the page with our eyes a continuous, systematic process. It is usually assumed that, when we are reading, our eyes travel smoothly, without interruptions, along the lines of a page, and that, when we are reading Western writing, for instance, our eyes go from left to right. This isn’t so. A century ago, the French ophthalmologist Émile Javal discovered that our eyes actually jump about the page; these jumps or saccades take place three or four times per second, at a speed of about 200 degrees per second. The speed of the eye’s motion across the page — but not the motion itself — interferes with perception, and it is only during the brief pause between movements that we actually “read”. Why our sense of reading is related to the continuity of the text on the page or to the scrolling of the text on the screen, assimilating entire sentences or thoughts, and not to the actual saccadic movement of the eyes, is a question which scientists have not yet been able to answer.28
Analysing the cases of two clinical patients — one an aphasic who could make eloquent speeches in a language that was gibberish, and the other an agnosic who could use ordinary language but was incapable of imbuing it with tone or emotion — Dr. Oliver Sacks argued that “speech — natural speech — does not consist of words alone.… It consists of utterance — an uttering-forth of one’s whole meaning with one’s whole being — the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition.”29 Much the same can be said of reading: following the text, the reader utters its meaning through a vastly entangled method of learned significances, social conventions, previous readings, personal experience and private taste. Reading in the Cairo academy, al-Haytham was not alone; reading over his shoulder, as it were, hovered the shadows of the Basra scholars who had taught him the Koran’s sacred calligraphy in the Friday Mosque, of Aristotle and his lucid commentators, of the casual acquaintances with whom al-Haytham would have discussed Aristotle, of the various al-Haythams who throughout the years became at last the scientist that al-Hakim invited to his court.
The language-sense divided according to its functions, as recorded in photographs of the human brain taken at the Washington University School of Medicine. (photo credit 2.5)
What all this seems to imply is that, sitting in front of my book, I, like al-Haytham before me, do not merely perceive the letters and blank spaces of the words that make up the text. In order to extract a message from that system of black and white signs, I first apprehend the system in an apparently erratic manner, through fickle eyes, and then reconstruct the code of signs through a connecting chain of processing neurons in my brain — a chain that varies according to the nature of the text I’m reading — and imbue that text with something — emotion, physical sentience, intuition, knowledge, soul — that depends on who I am and how I became who I am. “To comprehend a text,” wrote Dr. Merlin C. Wittrock in the 1980s, “we not only read it, in the nominal sense of the word, we construct a meaning for it.” In this complex process, “readers attend to the text. They create images and verbal transformations to represent its meaning. Most impressively, they generate meaning as they read by constructing relations between their knowledge, their memories of experience, and the written sentences, paragraphs and passages.”30 Reading, then, is not an automatic process of capturing a text in the way photosensitive paper captures light, but a bewildering, labyrinthine, common and yet personal process of reconstruction. Whether reading is independent from, for instance, listening, whether it is a single distinctive set of psychological processes or consists of a great variety of such processes, researchers don’t yet know, but many believe that its complexity may be as great as that of thinking itself.31 Reading, according to Dr. Wittrock, “is not an idiosyncratic, anarchic phenomenon. But neither is it a monolithic, unitary process where only one meaning is correct. Instead, it is a generative process that reflects the reader’s disciplined attempt to construct one or more meanings within the rules of language.”32
“To completely analyse what we do when we read,” the American researcher E.B. Huey admitted at the turn of our century, “would almost be the acme of the psychologist’s achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind.”33 We are still far from an answer. Mysteriously, we continue to read without a satisfactory definition of what it is we are doing. We know that reading is not a process that can be explained through a mechanical model; we know that it takes place in certain defined areas of the brain but we also know that these areas are not the only ones to participate; we know that the process of reading, like that of thinking, depends on our ability to decipher and make use of language, the stuff of words which makes up text and thought. The fear that researchers seem to express is that their conclusion will question the very language in which they express it: that language may be in itself an arbitrary absurdity, that it may communicate nothing except in its stuttering essence, that it may depend almost entirely not on its enunciators but on its interpreters for its existence, and that the role of readers is to render visible — in al-Haytham’s fine phrase — “that which writing suggests in hints and shadows”.34
An eleventh-century depiction of Saint Augustine at his lectern. (photo credit 2.6)
THE SILENT READERS
n AD 383, almost half a century after Constantine the Great, first emperor of the Christian world, was baptized on his death-bed, a twenty-nine-year-old professor of Latin rhetoric whom future centuries would know as Saint Augustine arrived in Rome from one of the empire’s outposts in North Africa. He rented a house, set up a school and attracted a number of students who had heard about the qualities of this provincial intellectual, but it wasn’t long before it became clear to him that he wasn’t going to be able to earn his living as a teacher in the imperial capital. Back home in Carthage his students had been rioting hooligans, but at least they had paid for their lessons; in Rome his pupils listened quietly to his disquisitions on Aristotle and Cicero until it came time to settle the fee, and then transferred en masse to another teacher, leaving Augustine empty-handed. So when, a year later, the Prefect of Rome offered him the opportunity of teaching literature and elocution in the city of Milan, and included travelling expenses in the offer, Augustine accepted gratefully.1
Perhaps because he was a stranger to the city and wanted intellectual company, or perhaps because his mother had asked him to do so, in Milan Augustine paid a visit to the city’s bishop, the celebrated Ambrose, friend and adviser to Augustine’s mother, Monica. Ambrose (who, like Augustine, was later to be canonized) was a man in his late forties, strict in his orthodox beliefs and unafraid of even the highest earthly powers; a few years after Augustine’s arrival in Milan, Ambrose forced the emperor Theodosius I to show public repentance for ordering a massacre of the rioters who had killed the Roman governor of Salonica.2 And when the empress Justina requested that the bishop hand over a church in his city so that she could worship according to the rites of Arianism, Ambrose organized a sit-in, occupying the site night and day until she desisted.
According to a fifth-century mosaic, Ambrose was a small, clever-looking man with big ears and a neat black beard that diminished rather than filled out his angular face. He was an extremely popular speaker; his symbol in later Christian iconography was the beehive, emblematic of eloquence.3 Augustine, who considered Ambrose fortunate to be held in such high regard by so many people, found himself unable to ask the old man the questions about matters of the faith that were troubling him because, when Ambrose was not eating a frugal meal or entertaining one of his many admirers, he was alone in his cell, reading.
Ambrose was an extraordinary reader. “When he read,” said Augustine, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.”4
A portrait of Saint Ambro
se in the church that bears his name, in Milan. (photo credit 3.1)
Eyes scanning the page, tongue held still: that is exactly how I would describe a reader today, sitting with a book in a café across from the Church of St. Ambrose in Milan, reading, perhaps, Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Like Ambrose, the reader has become deaf and blind to the world, to the passing crowds, to the chalky flesh-coloured façades of the buildings. Nobody seems to notice a concentrating reader: withdrawn, intent, the reader becomes commonplace.
To Augustine, however, such reading manners seemed sufficiently strange for him to note them in his Confessions. The implication is that this method of reading, this silent perusing of the page, was in his time something out of the ordinary, and that normal reading was performed out loud. Even though instances of silent reading can be traced to earlier dates, not until the tenth century does this manner of reading become usual in the West.5
Augustine’s description of Ambrose’s silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature. Earlier examples are far more uncertain. In the fifth century BC, two plays show characters reading on stage: in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Theseus reads in silence a letter held by his dead wife; in Aristophanes’ The Knights, Demosthenes looks at a writing-tablet sent by an oracle and, without saying out loud what it contains, seems taken aback by what he has read.6 According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great read a letter from his mother in silence in the fourth century BC, to the bewilderment of his soldiers.7 Claudius Ptolemy, in the second century AD, remarked in On the Criterion (a book that Augustine may have known) that sometimes people read silently when they are concentrating hard, because voicing the words is a distraction to thought.8 And Julius Caesar, standing next to his opponent Cato in the Senate in 63 BC, silently read a little billet-doux sent to him by Cato’s own sister.9 Almost four centuries later, Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, in a catechetical lecture probably delivered at Lent of the year 349, entreated the women in church to read, while waiting during the ceremonies, “quietly, however, so that, while their lips speak, no other ears may hear what they say”10 — a whispered reading, perhaps, in which the lips fluttered with muffled sounds.
If reading out loud was the norm from the beginnings of the written word, what was it like to read in the great ancient libraries? The Assyrian scholar consulting one of the thirty thousand tablets in the library of King Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BC, the unfurlers of scrolls at the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, Augustine himself looking for a certain text in the libraries of Carthage and Rome, must have worked in the midst of a rumbling din. However, even today not all libraries preserve the proverbial silence. In the seventies, in Milan’s beautiful Biblioteca Ambrosiana, there was nothing like the stately silence I had noticed in the British Library in London or the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The readers at the Ambrosiana spoke to one another from desk to desk; from time to time someone would call out a question or a name, a heavy tome would slam shut, a cartful of books would rattle by. These days, neither the British Library nor the Bibliothèque Nationale is utterly quiet; the silent reading is punctuated by the clicking and tapping of portable word-processors, as if flocks of woodpeckers lived inside the book-lined halls. Was it different then, in the days of Athens or Pergamum, trying to concentrate with dozens of readers laying out tablets or unfurling scrolls, mumbling away to themselves an infinity of different stories? Perhaps they didn’t hear the din; perhaps they didn’t know that it was possible to read in any other way. In any case, we have no recorded instances of readers complaining of the noise in Greek or Roman libraries — as Seneca, writing in the first century, complained of having to study in his noisy private lodgings.11
Augustine himself, in a key passage of the Confessions, describes a moment in which the two readings — voiced and silent — take place almost simultaneously. Anguished by indecision, angry at his past sins, frightened that at last the time of his reckoning has come, Augustine walks away from his friend Alypius, with whom he has been reading (out loud) in Augustine’s summer garden, and flings himself down under a fig-tree to weep. Suddenly, from a nearby house, he hears the voice of a child — boy or girl, he can’t say — singing a song whose refrain is tolle, lege, “take up and read”.12 Believing that the voice is speaking to him, Augustine runs back to where Alypius is still sitting and picks up the book he has left unfinished, a volume of Paul’s Epistles. Augustine says, “I took hold of it and opened it, and in silence I read the first section on which my eyes fell.” The passage he reads in silence is from Romans 13 — an exhortation to “make not provision for the flesh” but to “put ye on [i.e., ‘like an armour’] the Lord Jesus Christ”. Thunderstruck, he comes to the end of the sentence. The “light of trust” floods his heart and “the darkness of doubt” is dispelled.
Alypius, startled, asks Augustine what has affected him so. Augustine (who, in a gesture so familiar to us across those alien centuries, has marked the place he was reading with a finger and closed the book) shows his friend the text. “I pointed it out to him and he read [aloud, presumably] beyond the passage which I had read. I had no idea what followed, which was this: Him that is weak in the faith receive ye.” This admonition, Augustine tells us, is enough to give Alypius the longed-for spiritual strength. There in that garden in Milan, one day in August of the year 386, Augustine and his friend read Paul’s Epistles much as we would read the book today: the one silently, for private learning; the other out loud, to share with his companion the revelation of a text. Curiously, while Ambrose’s prolonged wordless perusal of a book had seemed to Augustine unexplainable, he did not consider his own silent reading surprising, perhaps because he had merely looked at a few essential words.
Augustine, a professor of rhetoric who was well versed in poetics and the rhythms of prose, a scholar who hated Greek but loved Latin, was in the habit — common to most readers — of reading anything he found written for sheer delight in the sounds.13 Following the teachings of Aristotle, he knew that letters, “invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent”, were “signs of sounds” and these in turn were “signs of things we think”.14 The written text was a conversation, put on paper so that the absent partner would be able to pronounce the words intended for him. For Augustine the spoken word was an intricate part of the text itself — bearing in mind Martial’s warning, uttered three centuries earlier:
The verse is mine; but friend, when you declaim it,
It seems like yours, so grievously you maim it.15
Written words, from the days of the first Sumerian tablets, were meant to be pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit, as if it were their soul, a particular sound. The classic phrase scripta manent, verba volant — which has come to mean, in our time, “what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air” — used to express the exact opposite; it was coined in praise of the word said out loud, which has wings and can fly, as compared to the silent word on the page, which is motionless, dead. Faced with a written text, the reader had a duty to lend voice to the silent letters, the scripta, and to allow them to become, in the delicate biblical distinction, verba, spoken words — spirit. The primordial languages of the Bible — Aramaic and Hebrew — do not differentiate between the act of reading and the act of speaking; they name both with the same word.16
In sacred texts, where every letter and the number of letters and their order were dictated by the godhead, full comprehension required not only the eyes but also the rest of the body: swaying to the cadence of the sentences and lifting to one’s lips the holy words, so that nothing of the divine could be lost in the reading. My grandmother read the Old Testament in this manner, mouthing the words and moving her body back and forth to the rhythm of her prayer. I can see her in her dim apartment in the Barrio del Once, the Jewish neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, intoning the ancient words from her bible, the only book in her house, whose black covers had come to rese
mble the texture of her own pale skin grown soft with age. Among Muslims too the entire body partakes of the holy reading. In Islam, the question of whether a sacred text is to be heard or read is of essential importance. The ninth-century scholar Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Hanbal phrased it in this manner: since the original Koran — the Mother of the Book, the Word of God as revealed by Allah to Muhammad — is uncreated and eternal, did it become present only in its utterance in prayer, or did it multiply its being on the perused page for the eye to read, copied out in different hands throughout the human ages? We do not know whether he received an answer, because in 833 his question earned him the condemnation of the mihnah, or Islamic inquisition, instituted by the Abassid caliphs.17 Three centuries later, the legal scholar and theologian Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali established a series of rules for studying the Koran in which reading and hearing the text read became part of the same holy act. Rule number five established that the reader must follow the text slowly and distinctly in order to reflect on what he was reading. Rule number six was “for weeping.… If you do not weep naturally, then force yourself to weep”, since grief should be implicit in the apprehension of the sacred words. Rule number nine demanded that the Koran be read “loud enough for the reader to hear it himself, because reading means distinguishing between sounds”, thereby driving away distractions from the outside world.18
The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind — in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading — is a late development in humankind’s evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing. He suggested that the earliest instances of reading might have been an aural rather than a visual perception. “Reading in the third millennium BC may therefore have been a matter of hearing the cuneiform, that is, hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture-symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.”19
A History of Reading Page 5
