How to Read Deeply

One of my favorite sketches on the show Portlandia is called “Did You Read It.” In the sketch Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein meet up at a coffee shop and get in a battle to see who has read more widely.

It starts innocently enough: Carrie: ”Hey did you guys read that thing in the New Yorker last month about how golf is an analogy for marriage?” Fred: “I did. I did read that. Did you read the thing in McSweeney’s that was comparing CD tracks and album tracks? Did you read that?” Carrie: “Ya. Did you read…”

The back and forth continues, and pretty soon they reach a fever pitch trying to outdo each other. They become locked in a battle of performative well-readness.

“Did you read that sky-writing over the Willamette River?”

“Yes—Did you read that fortune cookie?”

“Yes—Did you read the thing that guy wrote in the sand on the beach?”

“Yes.”

Their voracious reading habits ultimately lead to their demise, in a turn that is both absurd and apt.

But having the appearance of being “well-read” is not the same thing as reading deeply.

Writing to his apprentice in the first century C. E., the Roman philosopher Seneca warned the younger man against spreading his attention too thinly when it came to books. Be careful, Seneca advised, about reading “many different authors and books of every description.” In Seneca’s estimation, if you have more books in your library than you are able to read, you have too many books.

Marcus Aurelius said something similar 100 years later. “Throw away your books; stop letting yourself be distracted,” he wrote in Meditations. “Discard your thirst for books, so that you won't die in bitterness, but in cheerfulness and truth, grateful to the gods from the bottom of your heart.”

Today, Seneca and Marcus might add to their list the TV shows, music playlists, news feeds, and social media feeds that beckon to us constantly.

Yet both philosophers were also very well read. What then could they mean by this admonishment? Isn’t it good to “keep up” with current events, happenings, and goings on?

Seneca gives a clue as to the damage that scattered attention can cause. He wrote that skipping from one writer to another is like “food that is vomited up as soon as it is eaten.” The nourishment is “not assimilated into the body and does not do one any good.”

Instead, focus your mind deeply and for a nontrivial period on those questions and ideas that are truly substantive.

Seneca’s own practice was this: “Each day…acquire something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well. After running over a lot of different thoughts, pick out one to be digested thoroughly that day. That is what I do myself; out of the many bits I have been reading I lay hold of one.”

“The things you think about,” Marcus Aurelius wrote, “determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes the color of your thoughts.”

When is the last time you re-read something truly meaningful? If you’re a note-taker, when is the last time you re-read your notes?

Returning to them turns the soil and tends the garden of your thoughts.