Learning to Reread
As we conclude our exploration of reading practices that remedy distraction, hostility, and consumerism, we offer one final practice: rereading. Returning to a text for a second (or third, or fourth) encounter can be a powerful and memorable experience. For example, when I (Roberts) was a sophomore in college, I was assigned The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in a class called Introduction to Literature. As a reading response to that text, our professor asked if we had read this book as children and, if so, how we responded differently to the book now. I had indeed read the book as a child, and, while I no longer remember exactly what I wrote for this response, I remember the feeling of reflective nostalgia that accompanied the project, as if in remembering my childhood reading experiences, I was meeting my younger self again.1 This experience marks a formalized version of something all three of us have noted in our reading practices—the power of repetition, of reencountering a text. Multiple encounters with a text can create a deeper and more attentive encounter with the work. Such encounters are also opportunities to mark our personal growth and to linger over the parts of a text we most enjoy. In other words, although in the rest of this book we have divided up our reading practices into those that remedy distraction, those that remedy hostility, and those that remedy consumerism, in this conclusion we will briefly explore how rereading can counteract all three cultural vices and will, along the way, consider how these cultural vices, and consequently our resistance to them, are not separate but unified and intertwined.
In our fast-paced, distracted world, we can often see repetition and rereading as “wasted” time, time that would be better spent learning new skills or absorbing new information. Far from seeing repetition in our reading habits, discussions, syllabi, and practices as time that is wasted, however, we should view repetition and rereading as holy practices that allow us to resist the need for constant productivity, to see ourselves and others as we are, and to attend again to realities beyond our own fleeting concerns. As we reread, we participate in a kind of secular liturgy—secular in the sense that it is performed outside of a church service, not in the sense that it is separate from the sacred—that connects us to something larger than ourselves. In her book Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren writes of desperately praying Compline with her husband while enduring a miscarriage. Grief-stricken and bleeding, she cries out not a spontaneous, individual, personal prayer but a piece of liturgy recited by thousands of Christians for centuries before. “Patterns of prayer draw us out of ourselves, out of our own time-bound moment, into the long story of Christ’s work in and through his people over time,” she writes.2 Like these liturgical “patterns of prayer,” rereading intentionally pulls us away from our myopia and connects us to a larger story of human thoughts and ideas across time.
As teachers, we three probably reread more than most, since we often teach the same (or similar) classes from year to year, rereading familiar texts for each repeated class. Returning to or repeating an encounter with a text, however, is not limited to those of us in education. Christian practice frequently encourages rereading or reconsidering familiar texts throughout our lives, whether individually when we reread favorite passages or collectively through liturgy and song, returning to certain stories and themes at different seasons in the church year.3 Rereading and reencountering texts might happen in the short term, such as when we reread a dense text to understand it better or when we read a text communally (in a class or discussion group) that we previously read individually. Rereading may also happen on a longer timeline when, as with my (Roberts’s) encounter with Lewis’s novel, we return to a text at different points in our lives. In any of these permutations, rereading is a powerful remedy for distraction, hostility, and consumerism, as it deepens our insight, adds to or amends our previous impressions of the text, and allows us to reexperience moments of beauty and enjoyment.
When we reread texts, we frequently attend to aspects of those texts that we did not see the first time, thus deepening our understanding of them, resisting distraction, and inhabiting the present moment (activities we focus on in chapters 1 and 2). One example of how rereading a text refocuses our attention is when we come to see new interpretations or possibilities in subsequent readings. David I. Smith calls this act “read[ing] with humility,” a practice that rejects “an implied ethos of easy mastery” in favor of “discovering whole worlds of meaning that were missed the first time.”4 We ourselves have experienced the discovery process of multiple readings. For instance, the first time I (Roberts) read Shirley Jackson’s chilling story “The Lottery,” I assumed the lottery was indeed random, but on later readings, I began to pick up hints that the lottery might be rigged. Each rereading is thus a retuning of our attention, whether on details in the text we may have missed or on aspects of the text that our personal experiences may draw out. Another way we may reattend to a text is returning to it in a different format—for instance, by listening to the audio of a text that we previously read in print form. I (Roberts) am a quick reader of the printed page, but I often miss details on a first reading. When I listen to an audiobook, I catch descriptions and details I skimmed over the first time, deepening my attention to the text and particularly to each author’s distinctive style. When we attend to the same text more than once, the contrast between our previous and current reading, not to mention the act of repetition itself, allows us to resist distraction and deepen our insight.
This attentive focus to the text and ourselves also allows us to see ourselves and others with true vision, making space for charitable and prudent reading (our focus in chapters 3 and 4).5 By rereading texts, especially over the long term and at different points in our lives, we enter into a relationship with them, one that deepens with each encounter. These types of long-term relationships, like those with people, can combat the hostility that often comes with first impressions. The three of us have encountered these changing relationships with a variety of texts; one of us (Ooms) recently shared that she now feels less sympathy for the protagonist of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening—and far more for her overburdened servants—than she did when first reading the story as a young woman, while another of us (Roberts) complained her way bitterly through her first reading of Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania—a work that now forms the basis for much of her scholarly research. Similarly, when Griffis was in her early twenties, she read Thomas Merton’s No Man Is an Island and failed to grasp why a friend had spoken highly of it. About a decade later, she returned to the book, which subsequently played a significant role in her spiritual formation and continues to be one of her favorite devotional works. These altered interpretations allow us not only to enter into a long-term dialogue with these texts but also to encounter earlier versions of ourselves and our worldviews with a keen appreciation for our growth, compassion for our past selves, and humility as we consider what we may yet learn in future reading and rereading.
Rereading texts also remedies the consumeristic urge toward productivity and the desire to gain cultural capital by reading certain valuable texts (see chapters 5 and 6). Although we will never discourage readers from encountering treasured works of literature, philosophy, theology, history, and so on, we also firmly believe that reading a text only for the sake of adding it to one’s list of intellectual conquests is not the best way to read. Paul J. Griffiths points out that our culture “places a high value on claims to novelty, in both the order of being and that of knowing,” and he furthermore describes the desire for novelty as “a self-replicating desire that cannot be satisfied and that must lead to an agonizing restlessness.”6 Instead of seeking after the new, the noteworthy, and the prestigious, readers can resist consumerism’s utilitarian pull by lingering over texts, rereading them to pursue an understanding that goes beyond the surface level, returning to them for the pleasure of encountering a favorite character, scene, or passage. Griffiths, pointedly, recommends that we remedy our appetite for novelty through “repetition,” which means “return[ing] again and again to contemplation of the same object of study” as a “participant” rather than one intending to possess or dominate.7 I (Roberts) have harnessed the power of repetition and nostalgia to resist consumerism’s demand for constant productivity with my students. On days when I introduce overall concepts relating to literature and story, I bring a selection of children’s books to class. I bring at least one book per student and ask each student to read their book and identify key elements like plot, characters, and themes. I usually include a few classic children’s books that my students recognize—like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are or Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar—alongside newer books they may not have encountered. Whether they are rereading a book they remember or seeing a new one, returning to a type of literature not all of them encounter in everyday life (in this case, children’s books) gives my students not only a class day of lighthearted reading and enjoyment but also a sense of repetition, of returning to the past with a new focus. When we return to and linger over our texts, we resist the frantic pull toward the new that consumerism demands, savoring the beauty and joy that reading can bring—while also giving ourselves the opportunity to deepen our charity and our attentiveness.
Indeed, through the writing of this book, we three have come to see distraction, hostility, and consumerism—and their remedying virtues, including attentiveness, prudence, temperance, charity, docility, generosity, leisure, and joy—as deeply intertwined with one another, not easily separable into discrete categories. To resist one vice is to resist others, and to cultivate habits for one virtue (as we have shown here with rereading) is to create space for other virtues to flourish. We have also, however, become convinced that passivity and the status quo will not help us. When we actively seek to retrain our attention, grow our capacity for empathy, and deepen our regard for leisure and connection, we move toward the telos to which we aspire, where attentiveness, compassion, and joy lead us to deeper and healthier relationships with God and others. It is our hope that through the practices we have discussed in this book, our readers will join us in this active seeking. It is likely impossible for one person to implement all the practices we suggest in this book—they are, after all, the product of three different readers with decades of reading and teaching among us—but we hope that by adopting some of these practices, our readers will grow, individually and collectively, in their capacity for attention, for charity, and for enjoyment. Reading has brought substantial spiritual and moral goods into each of our lives, and we will continue to grow as readers and to explore practices that form our characters. We invite you to join us on this journey of forming and re-forming ourselves and our communities through deep reading of a varied and thoughtful selection of texts, through reflective writing and generous conversation about what we read, and through attentive, charitable, and leisurely rereading.
1. For a more sustained treatment of the power of children’s literature, see Katherine Rundell, Why You Should Read Children’s Books.
2. Warren, Prayer in the Night, 9.
3. For a classroom example, James K. A. Smith discusses an interesting combination of liturgical repetition and academic rhythms in “Keeping Time in the Social Sciences,” which documents how he and his students referenced the liturgical calendar and calendar of saints throughout an academic semester along with a midday prayer that Smith describes as “a cyclical, rhythmical pattern” (149).
4. D. I. Smith, “Reading Practices and Christian Pedagogy,” 51. Smith describes several ways in which he encourages his students to encounter a text more than once in a single semester (50–51); while Smith is, of course, focused on classrooms, other groups of readers could take these suggestions as inspiration for their own schedules.
5. See also D. I. Smith, On Christian Teaching, 69, on the importance of “seeing anew” and the “work of imagination.” Returning to a task, course design (Smith’s example), or text can ask us not only to see what is in front of us as it is but to see imaginatively, to see what it might be or become in the future.
6. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite, 209, 211.
7. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite, 214.