Eulogy for the Reading Life

Will technological innovation lead to the demise of the reader? Is the reader as a distinct type of person an endangered species in an age of podcasts and screens?

These are the questions at the heart of Lina Bolzoni’s delightful volume, A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe. This book is the product of a series of lectures by Bolzoni, professor emerita of Italian Literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Thus the chapters are somewhat episodic and flow in a thematic arc rather than as an integral argument. However, the consistent weight of Bolzoni’s response is evident through the progression of her lectures: we will, indeed, lose something significant if the art of reading is displaced by technology.

 Transformative Technologies

 Technology is not neutral. Bolzoni writes, “It is now clear that the new instruments of communication are not just objects, not just instruments as such: they have a profound impact on the individual using them (or being used by them), to the extent that they transform expectations, abilities, and emotions and consequently affect the brain itself, which is subjected to a pace of life quite unthinkable in the past” (2).

Young Girl Reading, Jean Honore Gragonard. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.46303.html Public Domain.

These technologies—the smart phone, the tablet computer, and virtual reality headsets—have a tendency to replace traditional technologies like books. There are clearly benefits to some of these electronic gizmos. I am frequently thankful for the maps streaming to my phone when I’m navigating a new area or trying to find a business in my town. But the ubiquity of screens and the relative ease of digesting electronic media—whether text or audio—has transformed the reading experience.

Though Bolzoni largely leaves readers to draw their own conclusions, one apparent danger of these technologies is they turn the reading process into an act of consumption or pure entertainment rather than being a sort of dialogue with the dead. Bolzoni quotes French novelist Marcel Proust who argues: “Reading however becomes dangerous when instead of waking us to the personal life of the spirit, it tends to substitute itself for it, when truth no longer appears to us as an ideal we can realize only through the intimate progress of our thought and the effort of our heart, but as a material thing, deposited between the leaves of books” (198).

Proust reflects some of the inward, modern turn—truth is realized by introspection. However, he does reveal the danger of expecting our media to do the hard work for us. That is, we expect the reading process to immediately make us more productive, more thoughtful, and more articulate, simply through the act of informational consumption. This is why some voracious readers who read all of the airport bookstore self-help books or complete the heavy lifting of making it through a checklist of “classic books everyone should read” simply to brag about it often remain shallow and boring. It’s also why those who consume primarily the latest best sellers or follow the most popular podcasts often offer little thoughtful commentary on the world.

 Reading As Conversation

 Balzoni’s book begins with a technological question, which remains in the background throughout the chapters, but the main thrust of the book is an exploration of reading in seven historical perspectives. Chapter One, for example, dives into Petrarch’s love for books and his exalted notions about a library. Bolzoni notes the Italian poet’s response to a priest forbidding his literary explorations, “Reading was for Petrarch a passionate love affair that one could not forswear, not even when threatened with all the torments of Hell” (15). That is, perhaps, an overstated response, but she argues, “The pleasure of reading is, Petrarch feels, more intimate and more intense than the satisfaction afforded by other worldly goods: its joy, which gets to the marrow itself, is the joy of a conversation, its pleasure stemming from the dialogue a book sets up with its reader” (15).

Throughout the Renaissance, scholars revel in finding and recovering lost manuscripts. These books do not merely project the ancient authors’ minds, but for the humanists, “dialogue with the ancients intertwines with the narrative of the manuscripts long forgotten in the in the libraries of monasteries” (38). The quest, the rediscovery, the resurrection of these ancient texts becomes, for many, a journey that leads to the growth of the explorer.

Significantly, reading is a social equalizer. Bolzoni argues, “The act of reading thus opens up a utopian space of equality, where hierarchies may be inverted and kings and potentates must await the will and leisure of the reader” (194). To some extent, of course, electronic media offers similar opportunities, but the pace, the ability to follow rabbit trails, and marginal notes are all best fulfilled in the physicality and slower cadence of the physical book. Audio (whether podcast or books) becomes cluttered when something like footnotes is attempted, putting the creator and producer in greater control of the experience. Additionally, with audio the conversation is less with the reader than it becomes either a monologue by the author or a conversation on the episode. These are all fine things, but distinct. “Rewinding” lacks the facility of flipping back a few pages. Furthermore, podcasts trap us in the time frame that specific technology exists and recordings of ancient texts necessarily inserts a more contemporary voice; I am not listening to Plato, but his modern avatar.

Eulogy Not Diatribe

Books that tackle technological questions, particular those that anticipate a negative perspective, can often slip into lament or protestation. The author ends up shaking her fist at the clouds yelling, “Get off my lawn.” A Marvelous Solitude does not do that. Bolzoni explores what we will lose when we no longer have physical libraries and when our minds are made shallow by constant access to the algorithmically addictive internet. What we discover is that we will lose a great deal.

This is a eulogy for the reading life. Notably absent from the book is deeper reflection on how limited the ideal reading life really was in social terms (other than the observation of an absence of female protagonists for her chapters). And yet, as we sit in a world of such plenty that most people work many fewer hours per week than their historical counterparts, we have largely abandoned the pursuit of reading as soul cultivation. As such, it seems, we have already lost much.

For those who love reading and thinking about reading, this book is a delight. Perhaps it will not change the world, but it did enrich my soul.

A Marvelous Solitude: The Art of Reading in Early Modern Europe (The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance Delivered at Villa I Tatti)

By Bolzoni, Lina

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NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this volume from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.