What Is Deep Reading?

*The lost skill of "deep reading"

In the book "Net Idiot--What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains," published in 2010 and increasingly more applicable today, journalist and sociologist Nicholas Carr laments that online life is running out of interruptions He laments that "online life is full of interruptions".

And such a life changes the way people process information in fundamental ways.

Even though reading online and gathering information can be more efficient, Carr argues, people have lost the ability to use "more time-consuming modes of contemplative thought".

We have moved away from the kind of cognition that forms connections, he explains, to the kind of cognition that merely scavenges for trivial information.

"We have lost the skill of deep reading," he says.

Have you ever been immersed in the kind of reading that feels like a flow state?

We authors have often experienced it during long plane trips or in places where there are no distractions - situations where there is nothing else competing for our attention for some amount of time. I've felt it when I've been completely engrossed in an excellent story.

Although the typical physicality of flow, which merges action and awareness, is not present in reading, reading can move one toward self-transcendence.

Indeed, reading is a kind of mental stimulation. Nevertheless, being totally immersed in it can be a means of overcoming distractions, internal and external. Even though the mind may be following a detail or subject, one can still be in it.

He is not opening his mind to outside sounds and information. He does not harbor judgments or expectations of right and wrong or right and wrong about his past or future.

*Sacred Reading" in Religious Traditions

Psychologists Jean Nakamura and Cixent Mihai have proposed a new field of study, the study of what they call "microflow activities," such as reading and doodling while thinking. These activities, the two believe, "may play an important role in optimizing attentional coordination."

In the Catholic and Anglican traditions, there is a practice called lectio divina. The Latin for "lectio divina" translates to "sacred reading." It refers to the cultivation of meaningful space through contemplation of the written word.

In this practice, one reads a passage of Scripture with the greatest depth and concentration and then contemplates its meaning. Similar to "deep reading," this is an attempt to encounter the words as directly as possible. There is only minimal plating of concepts.

A similar experience can sometimes be found in the spoken word. Esther Frankel told us this. A good worship leader always weaves silence into the prayer.

She described her tradition's chant-based service, called "Jewish Renewal," as follows. Chanting is a full use of the senses. It calms the mind and prepares it for immersion in stillness.

Something similar happens during sacred storytelling, she said. "Let's say you're telling a Hasidic Jewish story. Very well. It's like a Zen koan, where you have a moment of silence, and your mind tries to figure it out, and then you give up".

As a worship leader, she enjoys those moments. She adds, "You have to let the mind slow down. You have to slow it down in your heart. A good chant, a good prayer, a good story, brings one to a different state of being and prepares one for stillness".

The same is true of good poetry.

"Poetry emerges from the silence and leads one back to the original silence," said storytelling poet Marilyn Nelson in an interview by Krista Tippett.

Silence is the source of so much of what people need to survive in life. She continues. Poetry is made up of words, phrases, and sentences that emerge as if something is emerging from the water. They appear before us and call forth what is within us.

Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and two-term appointee to the Laureate Poet Laureate of the United States, said in one interview, "Poetry is the immediate language of inexpressible emotion".

Poetry defies the impossible. She muses that poetry is what people turn to in the most unspeakable and heartbreaking moments of their lives: birth, death, spiritual awakening, falling in love, and so on.

Every poem, regardless of rhythm or word count, has silence built into its structure. Silence is on the page, within a verse or series, between words.

Good poetry maintains a creative tension between the literal and the unlettered. It bounces through time like a smooth stone cutting through water. Leaving a blank space for this one reader, for what appears on this one day, in this one moment.

*Read a poem or a passage from a book every morning

If you feel as though you have never been "moved" by a poem before, ask a friend or someone close to you who has been moved, what their favorite poem is and what they like about it.

Read their favorite poem or have them recite it to you, and listen to the silence. Listen for the boundary between words and space. It's the balance between "silver" and "gold."

Poet David White writes, "Poetry is a linguistic art form through which one can create actual silence".

Writer and intellectual Susan Sontag states that the highest form of art, prose or rhyme, "leaves silence in its wake".

The simple habit of reading a poem or a passage from a book each morning can set the tone for the day. A quick read before bed can plant the seeds of a dream world.

Even if you are not reading the most exalted literary work, you should try to make reading itself an exercise in pure attention--an effort to "leave silence behind".

Last May Good Things Come in Your Life.