by Ed Simon
As an émigré from the dusty, sun-scorched Carthaginian provinces, there are innumerable sites and experiences in Milan that could have impressed themselves upon the young Augustine – the regal marble columned facade of the Colone di San Lorenzo or the handsome red-brick of the Basilica of San Simpliciano – yet in Confessions, the fourth-century theologian makes much of an unlikely moment in which he witnesses his mentor Ambrose reading silently, without moving his lips. Author of Confessions and City of God, father of the doctrines of predestination and original sin, and arguably the second most important figure in Latin Christianity after Christ himself, Augustine nonetheless was flummoxed by what was apparently an impressive act. “When Ambrose read, his eyes ran over the columns of writing and his heart searched out for meaning, but his voice and his tongue were at rest,” remembered Augustine. “I have seen him reading silently, never in fact otherwise.”
Such surprise, such wonderment would suggest that something as prosaic as being able to read silently, free of whispering lips and finger following the line, was a remarkable feat in fourth-century Rome, so much so that Augustine sees fit to devote an entire paragraph to his astonishment. Both men were exemplary theologians, Church Fathers, and eventually saints, but only Ambrose was able to accomplish this simple task which you’re most likely doing right now. For Ambrose – as for you and me and billions of other literate people the world over – literacy allows for a cordoned off portion of the self, a still mind as if an enclosed garden from which words may be privately considered, debated, ,or enjoyed, while for Augustine, by contrast, all of those millions of arguments he constructed could only be uttered aloud by their author, and by the vast majority of his readers.
“Augustine’s description of Ambrose’s silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the first definite instance recorded in Western literature,” explains Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading, while noting that a practice utterly familiar to us wasn’t commonplace until the tenth-century, around seven hundred years after the protégé witnessed Milan’s archbishop doing so. Prior to this passage in the Confessions, the only evidence of silent reading was a scene in Euripides and one in Aristophanes where characters examine stele and understand the content recorded without recourse to mouthing the words themselves, an anecdote by Plutarch whereby Alexander the Great shocked his troops by quietly reading a letter, and centuries later a brief reference to the practice by Saint Cyril of Jerusalem. Otherwise, Augustine’s account is the earliest delineation of the fact that “reading” was almost always synonymous with “reading out loud.”
Today, when a mark of the child learning how to read is the careful and methodical sounding out of words, it’s bizarre to consider how that exact same pose of reading was that which was familiar to Cicero and Catullus, Philo and Josephus, Tertullian and Origen, all of whom “must have worked in the midst of a rumbling din,” as Manguel poetically describes it. Among the ancients, the written word was always a prompt to oral communication, inert sounds preserved as alphabetic scratches on papyrus and parchment. To read a book wasn’t to retreat within the solitary silence of the skull, but rather as if to put on a record and listen to the music alongside anyone who might be nearby. There were material reasons for this (there are always partial material reasons for things); the uninterrupted lines of what was known as scripto Continua, whereby there were no spaces between sentences or even words, nor punctuation, made reading aloud necessary for parsing out individual sounds. A partial explanation for the practice of only reading aloud must have been cultural practice refined into inevitability by inertia. But there are, perhaps, also deeper cognitive or metaphysical reasons for the difference. Regardless of the exact why, there were implications to the transition from reading aloud to reading silently, of that final shift from being a half-oral culture to an entirely literate one. “And the text itself, protected from outsiders by its covers, became the reader’s own possession,” writes Manguel, “the reader’s intimate knowledge, whether in the busy scriptorium, market-place or the home.” From such reading came the divine conception of silence’s twin children – privacy and individuality.
No need to disparage reading aloud for the benefit of silent reading, however. There is a venerable, millennia-long tradition of delivered performance of literature, of oral literature that goes back to scrops and bards intoning around fires and which includes the monologues of actors and the poetry readings of today. American psychologist Julian Jaynes argued in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind that the earliest of all reading was in some sense “heard,” that far beyond the mere logistical difficulties of parsing out scripto Continua Ambrose’s antecedents were cognitively predisposed to understand literacy in aural terms. Hypothesizing on the experience of interpreting cuneiform when it was still new, Jaynes imagines “hallucinating the speech from looking at its picture symbols, rather than visual reading of syllables in our sense.”
A context such as this would configure reading as a cacophonous activity, a collective one. This way of being has long survived even as we’ve stopped hallucinating the words in favor of reading them. During the eighteenth-century, for example, when literacy was already as widespread as it had ever been, elocutors enthralled crowds with dramatic readings from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela or Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, the essayist Joseph Addison claiming in the Spectator that literature must come “out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses.” Historical examples such as these are often alluded toward whenever a stuffy critic makes the boring case that audiobooks aren’t really literature, even while by the eighteenth-century silent reading was largely the most common.
We don’t need to engage scurrilous reasoning which dismisses oral performance, but we can also admit that there is something different, and thus important, about silent reading. For all that oral reading may give us – the feeling of being under the guidance of a master performer or the social cohesion of enjoying literature in a crowd – there are also distinct attributes of quiet and internal reading that signal an irrevocable alteration in the human predicament. As Manguel enumerates, rather than forging a collective identity with literature through performance, with “silent reading the reader was at last able to establish an unrestricted relationship with the book and the words.” A reader would be able to either speed through a text or dwell in as leisurely a manner as they wanted. They would be able to skip through that which bored them and perseverate on that which needed parsing, the white space of the page’s border a frontier dedicated towards the freedom of marginalia. Most radically, as a pure experience mediated only through the individual and her book, the reader could be enveloped by the contents of the author’s mind, an unmediated experience that was as a reformation in literacy, a priesthood of all readers.
This was an intimate negotiation which necessitated the beautiful loneliness of the single skull. Is it any wonder that a notion of inviolate human rights defined in terms of the independence of the mind followed the emergence of silent reading? What such a space allowed for was the establishment of a kingdom of the solitary reader, content to generate her own meanings from the book, to be inspired or disgusted, illuminated or enraged, convinced or informed on her own terms. A silent reader can define the contours of her own experience independent of authority (for why else did moralists during the early modern period express outrage at the increase in women enjoying books by themselves, often in the erotic space of the bedroom, a related innovation?). A silent reader can possess an infinite space even if in bondage (for why were the enslaved in the antebellum South punished for their literacy?). Most of all, a silent reader can accept or reject the creation of the author on their own terms, at their own leisure, and in private, for a woman can enjoy an erotic pamphlet tucked into her own sleave or a laborer an incendiary political pamphlet in his satchel and no one else need be aware. Silent reading is based on nothing less than the unabridged spiritual sovereignty of the individual agent. The entire panoply of human rights followed shortly after.
Jaynes writes (with the italics his) that “each new stage of words literally created new perceptions and attentions, and such new perceptions and attentions resulted in important cultural changes,” with the adaption of writing, an alphabet, of punctuation, of printing, of silent reading each signifying and perhaps causing attendant paradigm shifts in consciousness. There were material reasons for such things – the fact that a gap between words and the introduction of periods made silent reading easy should attest to that. Silent reading was encouraged over the long course of the previous millennium because of other interrelated technological innovations as well. There was the fifteenth-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, who among other revolutionary inventions developed both italic print and the semicolon, was the first to print the classics in an octavo format, which was a book small enough to fit in a sporran or purse or satchel, a size conducive to solitary perusing. It wasn’t only the size of books that shrunk, but of living spaces as well, with individual bedrooms (at least among the upper-classes) becoming a feature of domesticity during the long early modern period from the late Renaissance through the Enlightenment.
As any Marxist social historian will explain, all of these obviously material changes were required for the profound cultural shift as regards methods of reading; what the Marxist social historian too often forgets is that mater is every bit as mysterious and ineffable as that thing called “spirit” (indeed they’re practically synonyms). Regardless for the disparate reasons that such a transition happened, it happened, and the widespread appeal of silent reading was as much a spiritual revolution as it was a social one. Now reading allowed for private contemplation, to exist within a cordoned silo, to be bound between the covers of an octavo and count ourselves kings of infinite space. For more than five centuries we’ve had the option of reading in a manner that’s not just collective, but individual, not just peninsular, but islandic. Silent reading is the closest humanity has ever come to reinventing dreaming.
In Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology, Walter Ong argues (and warns) that there is a coming epoch of “second orality,” where the printed page would lose its primacy to new methods of communication that privilege the imagistic and the spoken. The internet has largely proven Ong’s assertion correct, but rather than just a second orality, I argue that there is a second din which is getting louder and which threatens to drown out our own thoughts. The volume of the internet age is just as important as its supposed orality, where a dozen open tabs preclude the reading of a single paragraph, where the magnificence of the novel is sacrificed for the brevity of the ever-taggable 280 characters. Again, don’t mistake my argument as being anything so mundane as complaining about people enjoying audiobooks on Spotify, but rather the ways in which the island of a book is now connected by digital isthmus to every single other book in all of creation. The boundaries of the cover have been abolished, since the first, and second, and third, and now fourth digital revolutions there has been a war of attrition against the sovereign domain of the single, individual, private book, and the variety of reading which animates such books.
Rather than having the space by which the reader enters into the singular dimension of silent book, where the required time and patience are devoted to the cultivation of interiority, we exist within a neon miasma of hypertext and pop-up, every single work connected to every other work in a matrix of association where nothing is ever truly given the undivided attention to which it might hold right. Sven Birkerts in The Guttenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age writes that “More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those interactions are such as to keep us hovering in the virtual now, a place away form ourselves.” What I’ve called “silent reading” Birkerts has termed “deep reading,” but the benefits are the same, an activity where “energies that otherwise tend to stream outward through a thousand channels of distraction are marshaled by the cadences of the prose; they are brought into focus by the fact that it is an ulterior, and entirely new, world that the reader has entered.” Encomiums to silent reading aren’t mere antiquarianism or metaphysical enthusiasm, for there are clear and obvious political implications with the abolishment of privacy inaugurated by our new din.
As efforts by the alt-right to ban books increase throughout the United States, there is a new urgency to defend the power of specifically the printed page and the privacy of silent reading. Dismiss such efforts as distant from whatever blue state coastal metropolis you may incorrectly assume provides easy refuge, when the algorithm is all-powerful there is no longer such a thing as distance. Because the digitally connected network of books doesn’t really exist anywhere it counterintuitively exists everywhere, but all the easier to burn those books if some authority sees fit. Consider the reports in the last decade about how Amazon surreptitiously deleted (and refunded) individual titles from readers’ Kindles, including unauthorized books by J.K. Rowling and J.D. Salinger. Amazon’s reasons for doing so weren’t political; those actions were taken because third-parties had sold those e-books without the proper copyright, but the justification is irrelevant once the mechanism exists.
A physical library can be hidden under a mattress or in a closet, behind a wall or in a buried chest, but a digital library is only as good as the graces of the hegemon whom you pay to keep the lights on. As if to underscore the situation perfectly, in 2009 Amazon most notoriously deleted from readers’ Kindles copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, again because they were sold by an unauthorized third-party. Consider how much more fortunate Orwell’s protagonist Winston Smith was in some senses than we are, for silent reading (and writing) were still possible in the Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four, as he only needed to work in his journal outside of the eye of his telescreen. In the world of 2024, by contrast, our books and journals are on the telescreen. No need for the censor to dirty their hands with black marker and White-Out when it’s so much cleaner just to hit “Delete.”
The most pressing implications of the digital second din are even more intrinsic, however. It’s not only that the abolishment of widespread silent reading allows for the sort of censorship described in the previous paragraph, it’s that the atrophying of silent reading could lead to the sort of mushy souls that don’t even care about such things as censorship. The infinitely connected digital book, a creature of electromagnetic radiation whose tendrils ensnare everything ever written, is a monad of over-abundance. For the digital reader, nothing is important because everything is important. By contrast, the dedication, patience, interiority, and blessed aloneness which is cultivated in silent reading is the only manner humanity has ever achieved for allowing a true dedicated communion between reader and writer, a type of literary monogamy that promises not the cheapness of abundance but the treasure of intensity. This trinity of reader, writer, and book inculcates a quietism whereby the Inner Light can be cultivated; without it, our selves become undifferentiated, our souls inchoate. In the monastery that is silent reading, we can fashion the self, construct ourselves as individuals, differentiate our spirits from one another. “Their communications are not to be given or taken with the lips and the end of the tongue,” writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in Society and Solitude, “but out of the glow of the cheek, and with the throbbing heart.” Ultimately, we must read as we dream – alone.
Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, and a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily. The author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Relic will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in January as part of their Object Lessons series, while Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain will be released by Melville House in July of 2024.