The modern world firmly equates the intelligent person with the well-read person. Reading
books, a lot of books, has become the hallmark of brilliance as well, apparently, as the
supreme gateway to understanding. If we don’t read four of this year’s major prize winning
books as well as maybe seven fascinating titles that have received ardent reviews in the Sunday
supplements since March, then we’ll be condemned to guilt and shame.
Yet amidst this pressure to eat our way through an ever-larger number of titles, we
might pause to reflect on a fascinating aspect of the pre-modern world: this world never
put people under any pressure to read very much at all. Reading was held to be extremely
important, but the number of new books one read was entirely by the by. This wasn’t
principally an economic point. Books were very expensive of course, but this wasn’t
really the issue. What mattered was to read a few books very well, not squander one’s
attention promiscuously on a great number of volumes.
The premodern world directed us to read so little because it was obsessed by a question
that modernity likes to dodge: what is the point of reading? And it had answers. To take
a supreme example, Christians and Muslims located the value of reading in a very specific
and narrow goal: the attainment of holiness. To read was to try to approximate the mind
of God. In each case this meant that one book, and one book only - the Bible or the Koran
- was held up as vastly and incomparably more important than any other. To read this book,
repeatedly and with great attention, probably five or so pages every day, was thought more
crucial than to rush through a whole library every week; in fact reading widely would have
been regarded with suspicion, because most other books would - to some extent - have
to prove misleading and distracting.
Similarly, in the Ancient Greek world, one was meant to focus in on a close knowledge
of just two books: , because these were deemed the perfect repository of the Greek code of
honour and the best guides to action in military and civilian affairs.
We can pick up some of this minimalist attitude to reading in early visual depictions
of one of the heroes of Christian scholarship, St Jerome - who was by all accounts the supreme
intellect of Christendom, a man who translated the Greek and Hebrew portions of the Bible
into Latin, wrote a large number of commentaries on scripture and is now the patron saint of
libraries and librarians. But despite all his scholarly efforts, when it came to showing
where and how St Jerome worked, one detail stands out: there are almost no books in his
famous study. Strikingly, the most intelligent and thoughtful intellectual of the early church
seems to have read fewer things than an average modern eight year old.
Antonello da Messina, St Jerome in his study, 1475
The modern world has dramatically parted ways with this minimalist ancient approach
to reading. We have adopted an Enlightenment mantra that runs in a very different direction,
stating that there should be no limit to how much we read because, in answer to the question
of why we do so, there is only one response that will ever be encompassing or ambitious
enough: we read in order to know everything.
But we can hazard an observation: this exhaustive approach to reading does not make
us particularly happy. So in order to ease and simplify our lives, we might dare to ask
a very old-fashioned question: what am I reading for? And this time, rather than answering
‘in order to know everything,’ we might parcel off a much more limited, focused and
useful goal. We might - for example - decide on a new mantra to guide our reading henceforth:
we might want to read in order to learn to be content. Nothing less - and nothing more.
With this new, far more targeted ambition in mind, much of the pressure to read constantly
and randomly starts to fade. Once we know that we are reading to be content, we don’t
need to chase every book published this season. We can zero in on titles that best explain
what we deem to be the constituent parts of contentment. So for example, we may need a
few key books that will explain our psyches to us, that will teach us about how families
work and how they might work better, that can take us through how to find a job we can
love or how to develop the courage to develop our opportunities. We’ll probably need some
books that talk about friendship and love, sexuality and health. Some books that gently
guide us to how to minimise regret and learn to die well.
The more we understand what reading is for us, the more we can enjoy intimate relationships with a few works only. The truly well-read person isn’t the one who has read a gargantuan
number of books, it’s someone who has let themselves be deeply shaped by just a few,
very few well-chosen titles.