The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  She’d never spoken before! I said, “Would you like to sing it to us?” And she did! She started crying. The tears were pouring down her face, and she said, I was evacuated in the war and we were at a fire station and I haven’t heard that song since then and you’ve just given me back my childhood.

  When you’re in these kind of groups, talking about stories, anything can come up. You just don’t know what’s coming.

  “It makes me think,” the blind member of Fulton’s group said. “You use your brain and you find things that interest you that you normally don’t talk about. You get an insight into different stories. It’s surprising what you can learn about other people, too. It’s not as though you’re in school and being taught. It’s a friendly relationship.”

  “It’s interaction with other people,” the man put in.

  “It brings literature to life,” said another woman. “You hear something and you discuss it. You can put yourself in the protagonist’s shoes. It’s stimulating. Otherwise, you look at the four walls or watch television or something like that.”

  * * *

  THERE’S REASON TO believe that reading groups of this sort offer the people who take part more than just vague, anecdotal benefits.

  “On the emotional level, it’s just wonderfully nourishing,” said Paul Higgins, an early volunteer for The Reader who eventually became the organization’s first salaried employee. “Not all of us have had that wonderful, almost primordial experience of being read to as children, and soothed. Interestingly, given the opportunity, people, particularly older people, often say, ‘It’s so relaxing.’ Loving-kindness is what people experience, through the literature, through the network that builds up, the lifeline that builds up week to week. Kindness, love, and beauty. That’s what hits people. That’s what’s so amazing about it.”

  In a 2010 survey in the UK, elderly adults who joined once-a-week reading groups reported having better concentration, less agitation, and an improved ability to socialize. The survey authors attributed these improvements in large part to the “rich, varied, non-prescriptive diet of serious literature” that group members consume, with fiction encouraging feelings of relaxation and calm, poetry fostering focused concentration, and narratives of all sort giving rise to thoughts, feelings, and memories.

  There may be another desirable long-term benefit of enjoying serious literature. Recent research at Yale University finds that people who read for pleasure live an average of two years longer than nonreaders, and that, further, reading books seems to have a greater protective effect than reading newspapers or magazines. “This effect is likely because books engage the reader’s mind more,” explained Yale’s Avni Bavishi. “Cognitive engagement may explain why vocabulary, reasoning, concentration, and critical thinking skills are improved by exposure to books.” Literature, she said, “can promote empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence, which are cognitive processes that can lead to greater survival.”

  More exciting still, perhaps, are the effects of reading aloud on people who have Alzheimer’s disease. A 2017 paper from clinicians at the University of Liverpool hints at huge potential promise for not only the 800,000 men and women with dementia in the UK but Alzheimer’s sufferers everywhere.

  “Reading a literary text together not only harnesses the power of reading as a cognitive process: it acts as a powerful socially coalescing presence, allowing readers a sense of subjective and shared experience at the same time,” the study’s authors wrote.

  That is easy enough to appreciate, of course, but there’s more: “Research suggests that the inner neural processing of language when a mind reads a complex line of poetry has the potential to galvanise existing brain pathways and to influence emotion networks and memory function.”

  (As Cornell’s Morten Christiansen told me, “Experience and use of language do matter throughout your life. Language is a bit like a muscle. It will atrophy if you’re not using it.” In Japan, with its large population of elderly people, clinicians are exploring how a bit of daily reading and math can sharpen cognitive skills that have been dulled by age and lack of use. In 2016, researchers at Tohoku University enlisted a group of healthy elderly people to undertake “learning therapy” for six months. The therapy involved the volunteers performing simple math calculations and reading short passages of Japanese prose out loud. By the end of the experiment, many of the subjects had experienced cognitive improvements.)

  For many people who get together every week to read aloud, part of the pleasure comes from the sheer physiological relief of being in the company of others. Men and women who live by themselves, or who are confined to hospitals or nursing homes or prisons, may have only rare contact with others, or contact that is principally practical, transactional, and hierarchical. They may not have many opportunities to engage with other people as equals, let alone to experience poetry or short stories out loud. With affecting candor, an inmate of one of Britain’s most notorious prisons described how participating in the Reader sessions felt to him: “It is almost as if literature ‘raises the bar’ and leaves the reader feeling like an explorer of a different world, or at least privileged to have glimpsed into another realm that is ‘otherworldly.’ The group’s overall relaxed and soothing atmosphere seems to draw me near and fill some sort of need in me I did not know was there.” (Italics mine.)

  * * *

  MODERN LIFE CAN be a lonely, isolated affair. With the advent of the digital revolution, loneliness as a cultural phenomenon appears to be intensifying. By one recent assessment, rates of loneliness have doubled since the 1980s. Today in the United States, upward of 40 percent of adults suffer from some degree of isolation. We are social animals, as Aristotle said. Feeling disconnected and alone can take a grievous toll. People who feel lonely are three times as likely to report symptoms of anxiety and depression, according to a recent Danish study. Lonely hearts face double the mortality risk from diseases of the heart.

  “The world is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. If we cannot rebuild strong, authentic social connections, we will continue to splinter apart,” former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote recently in the Harvard Business Review. This epidemic is doing damage not only to minds and hearts, he argued, but to our bodies: “Loneliness causes stress, and long-term or chronic stress leads to more frequent elevations of a key stress hormone, cortisol. It is also linked to higher levels of inflammation in the body. This in turn damages blood vessels and other tissues, increasing the risk of heart disease, diabetes, joint disease, depression, obesity, and premature death. Chronic stress can also hijack your brain’s prefrontal cortex, which governs decision making, planning, emotional regulation, analysis, and abstract thinking.”

  It is an awful catalog of suffering, given how simple and inexpensive the means of relief. Reading has an astonishing power to salve and console, lifting the lonesome from their isolation and offering reprieve to the sick from the exhausting weight of illness.

  We are not even the only species to benefit. Dogs do, too, which is why, since 2014, volunteers at the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have read to the animals to help them recover from trauma.

  “Ten or fifteen years ago, I was essentially the only person who worked with the neglect and abuse cases,” said Victoria Wells, the organization’s senior manager for behavior and training, when we met at ASPCA headquarters in Manhattan.

  There were times when the dogs were isolated in quarantine because they came in and they were ill. They couldn’t get up, because they were being treated for severe injuries. I wanted to interact with them somehow, but I couldn’t take them out and work with them in a physical way. It wasn’t good for them medically.

  So I used to sit with them, in front of their kennels, and play guitar and sing. I used to play the Beatles. I noticed that the dogs who were very fearful, in the back of their kennels shivering and cowering, would slowly creep forward to the front. They would appear to be listening and
they would become very relaxed.

  The dogs’ response to music led in a natural way to the idea of reading aloud. It was a practical means of allowing a larger number of volunteers to minister to recovering animals without having to interact with the dogs in a direct way that might be intimidating. Wells and her colleagues worked out a careful protocol to minimize stress. Today’s volunteers are trained to use an even, reassuring tone of voice, and to sit so that they aren’t directly facing the dogs, lest they seem confrontational. The choice of material is up to the readers. Some volunteers keep the animals appraised of current events by reading the newspaper, some choose children’s books, and others prefer adult fiction. On the day I stopped by, a retired opera singer was reading the 1967 sci-fi thriller Logan’s Run to half a dozen dogs housed in a row of clear glass enclosures. I noticed a lot of noisy barking when she started, but soon her voice settled on them like an audio blanket, and the animals subsided into restful poses.

  “The dogs really enjoy the reading,” Wells told me. “I think the fact that it’s nonthreatening but it’s attention, all the same, is what is most beneficial to these dogs. We noticed that it really does assist in the standard behavior treatment. The dogs are much more receptive to us, they seem more comfortable in their kennels in general (because it’s sort of like being in a fishbowl, and when people loom over them it can be very intimidating), but it really prepares them for people having to walk by, and adopters coming and looking at them and potentially taking them home. I think it’s that soothing, even tone of voice and the presence of somebody to keep them company that really, really benefits them.”

  If even dogs flourish when we read aloud to them, it’s hardly surprising that people do, too, whether it happens by design, as with the British reading groups, or through a moment of serendipity in a hospital room or on a long drive through the Adirondacks.

  For adults, literature shared by the voice becomes an opportunity for encounter, companionship, and self-discovery. It’s a balm for the lonely heart and a means of escape from surroundings and confinements that may be as much mental as physical. It offers connectedness both in the moment and, in a deep way, with the full richness of human experience. “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened one hundred years ago to Dostoyevsky,” James Baldwin once reflected. “This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”

  * * *

  LITERARY ART HELPS us live longer, and enjoying it together out loud makes us smarter, happier, and more contented. It may even be—we can perhaps extrapolate from the Tohoku University research—that being the reader, the rhapsode, is in itself good for the body and soul.

  The second-century Roman doctor Antyllus thought it was. Antyllus recommended daily recitation to his patients as a kind of health-giving tonic. He had the fanciful idea that some arrangements of words were more wholesome than others: “Ideally one should declaim epic verse from memory, but if this is not possible it should be iambic verse, or elegiac or lyric poetry. Epic verse is, however, the best for one’s health.”

  I somehow don’t see hordes of wellness enthusiasts rushing to take up the recitation of epic verse as a way of fending off aches and pains, but those of us who adore reading aloud will be the first to say that it does feel as if something salubrious happens when we hold forth. The human voice is potent, and when it is put in service of beautiful writing, the effect can be a delight from the inside as well as the outside.

  Reading to a spouse or a sibling or a parent might seem like a bit too much effort—so far outside the normal range of most people’s regular activities as to be eccentric and a little peculiar. Linda Khan told me that right before she started to read the Churchill biography to her father in the hospital, she was tempted to put the book down again. It felt odd and even improper to presume to read to a man who, for her entire life, had always been strong and independent. She did not want him to feel patronized. Her fear was misplaced, as we know; they both ended up loving the experience. Like so many others who brave the momentary weirdness of reading to another adult, they were, to borrow a phrase from Wordsworth, surprised by the joy of it.

  Who wouldn’t want that? One night years ago a friend of mine wandered into his family’s living room after supper and picked up a paperback copy of Michael Shaara’s Civil War novel The Killer Angels. Without thinking much about it, he started to read the preface out loud. Immediately he was joined by his eldest son, who was about twelve at the time. A moment later his wife came in, followed by the couple’s two young daughters, who at six and eight were not perhaps the target audience for an introduction to Robert E. Lee and Joshua Chamberlain but wanted to be part of a family moment. Within a few minutes, everyone seemed so comfy and engaged that my friend kept reading. It went on for an hour that night. He picked the book up again after dinner the next night, and the next, until he had finished the book. That experience of enjoying literature together, my friend told me, remains one of his family’s happiest memories, one they still talk about when they all see each other.

  “I wish I could tell you that it became a tradition to read together every night after The Killer Angels,” he told me, “But we never did it again. I don’t know why. I guess we just got busy.”

  My friend is wistful about it now. He and his family were surprised by joy—drawn together for enchanted hours with a book that had them all in thrall—and then they let it slip away.

  Chapter 9

  There Is No Present Like the Time

  Read to me!

  Any time! Any place!

  —slogan of the Family Reading Partnership, Ithaca, NY

  Once upon a time there was a modest house in the suburbs of a small American city, and in that house lived a middle-class family, the Rashids. The parents were Julie and Alex, and at the time of our story they had three children: ten-year-old Eva, six-year-old Joseph, and twenty-one-month-old Ethan, a compact bundle of muscle and energy known as “the baby.”

  Julie and Alex had heard that it was a good idea to read to their children, and they planned to do it . . . someday. But with the tumult of life in a busy extended family—both parents belong to large local clans, hers half Greek and his 100 percent Syrian—and with work and school and with iPhones and iPads and the big-screen TV in the living room, not to mention the inevitable upheaval of the baby’s arrival, neither parent ever got around to it.

  Being willing, but so far unable, the Rashids were perfect test subjects for a reading experiment. They agreed to undergo a three-month trial that would take them, overnight, from reading nothing out loud to reading every day. They promised me that they would turn off their tech and read for at least half an hour each time, with the understanding that we all fall short of the mark and that they might miss a session once in a while. What would happen? Would Julie and Alex find it a chore? Would the children squirm and bolt for the TV? Could the baby pay attention for five minutes, let alone thirty? Would the parents see any change in their children’s vocabulary? Like a conservationist introducing wolves into the wild—except, I suppose, it was the opposite—I wondered what effect the alteration would have on the inhabitants of this plugged-in ecosystem, and hoped for the best.

  “We’re really excited,” Julie said, when I showed up on their doorstep one Memorial Day weekend with two bags of board books, picture books, and chapter books to help get them started.

  Inside, the atmosphere was happy and electric. Joseph dove for the bags and began grabbing books willy-nilly. “What book is this?” he said several times, not waiting for an answer and not really even looking as he tossed one volume after another onto the shag carpet of the family room.

  The baby was nonstop action, treading on the books his brother had thrown, pulling off dust jackets, rolling around holding his feet, angling for my digital recorder wherev
er I put it, and at one point working his way behind me so as to thump me in a friendly way between the shoulder blades. Quiet and smiling, Eva leafed through some of the offerings, shushed Joseph, who tended to interrupt, and rescued picture books from the baby’s investigating jaws.

  “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and never made the time for,” Julie explained. “So now we’re going to implement it. It’s on the calendar. We have a set schedule. It’s like we’re signed up for the next activity, and we’re all on board. We’re excited about it.”

  “It’s going to keep us accountable,” Alex agreed.

  While the grown-ups were planning, the boys were in riot mode. Joseph had pulled the cover off A Butterfly Is Patient, spun the denuded book onto the sofa, and turned to find a fresh victim. Without missing a beat, his mother restored the cover to the book and was saying to her husband, “I’m thinking of implementing the book reading at an earlier time, because you’re home by the seven or seven thirty time slot.”

  “Just have fun with it,” I said, “No need to be strict about who reads, or when, or where.”

  I had meant to tell the Rashids about dialogic and interactive reading, but in the moment decided against it. They were starting from scratch and taking it all so seriously that I was afraid of overwhelming them. I did suggest that they try reading while the boys were in the bath, and urged Julie and Alex to let the children move around and play with toys during the reading if they wanted to. It was hard to imagine this frenetic troupe sitting still.

  “Wonderful,” said Julie, raising her voice over Ethan’s bawling. “We’re going to start June first, and we’re going to give you three full months.”