Reading books

Reading books is a remarkable activity. When we read a novel that arouses our interest, we submerge ourselves in a world of thoughts and feelings of another human being - the author - who tries to communicate all kinds of situations, persons and events. When we read a study book, for instance, a book from Steiner's Collected Works, it can at first be far more difficult to get into it. But finally we will be carried along with it by the interest aroused in the contents. We can then perceive how our attention is becoming deeper and stronger and how this leads us to experiencing the contents, such as we had in reading a novel which leads us directly to such experiences.

We hold the book in our hands; it is made of paper and cardboard, it has a number of pages, we turn them while reading - and finally we finish it. If it was a good book, we will regret finishing it. If it is an uninteresting book that we still have to read, we will count the pages still to go. The book smells like new paper, it mimics our own being, our way of reading, we can love it, and we can hate it. It is a material thing, but it has a kind of soul- or spirit-awakening action that goes far beyond itself, the paper, the dimensions and so on.

We travel a lot and we always drag along some bags, containing the books we really need. It is rather troublesome, because they take up space and are heavy to carry. Besides, it is impossible to have all the books we need in our luggage, there are always books missing, left behind at home. Therefore it is really very handy that there is another way to have our literature at hand while travelling. Because it is particularly the books of Rudolf Steiner that we were always needing, we ordered the Collected Works (Gesamtausgabe) on an external hard disk, for reading on the laptop. Later, this seemed to be already outdated, because on the internet there are sites where one can immediately find the whole Collected Works, including the English translations, even on the smartphone. This really is a 'smart' solution if forgotten facts have to be found in the vast literature. I have no problem at all in using this opportunity. But precisely through this practice I have learned to experience both reading on screen and also the differences from reading text in a true book. I will try to put this into words. There are a lot of people who strongly deny that there are any differences between reading a book and reading on screen. They think that they can simply transfer themselves as book-readers to reading on screen, so that they lose nothing but only gain greatly. I want to contradict this here.

The computer in fact is a calculator, let us not forget this. Don't think this isn't working, when we read on screen, although the letters, words and sentences are exactly the same as in a hard copy book. Something else comes to meet us when reading on screen. A book lies quiet and unchanging in our hands. It only conveys the contents and the thoughts and feelings that lie in the text we are reading. From the screen, however, a whole technical world and sub-nature confronts us. Letters and words and sentences are there, of course, but they have an additional effect through the medium in which they appear. They are much further away from our experiencing; they are far more semblance than we think. The medium keeps us at a distance from the reality of the read contents and effects that come from reading. Actually, we should take a few steps away from the computer or phone to let the content come in to our souls, and try to make it more real by a kind of meditation, an intensifying of the feelings. Only then can we find the effects that we can have while reading the hard copy book in our hands. This is one of the insidious effects: the level of thinking with texts on the screen becomes far more vague and abstract.

A second effect can be seen in our growing levels of impatience. The machine is a driving force that expels our inner peace. We become impatient and hurried, the reading of a text that asks for deeper attention and slow reading irritates us. We want to become fast readers - and we will be. We read along, passing quickly through clauses that are not so interesting, we learn to read 'diagonally', quickly, and in overviews. The danger is that we don't perceive the way we are reading: the balance of perception and thinking shifts to a loss of perception and a reinforcement of our personal thoughts. We read with interest what we already have grasped, and with growing antipathy what is new: just pass over, quick, quick, quick! We can't and don't want to submerge ourselves in the contents any more, we have to go quickly over it and we learn to live in overviews on the surface: a superficial reading technique is being learned. Again, this can be very nice and useful in certain circumstances. But we develop a way of reading that we then can't get rid of. When we next take up a book it becomes much more difficult to go into the depths of the contents again. We don't feel like doing this any more, it is too much effort, takes too much time. This habit spreads easily to our listening to people other than ourselves: we want to have this in an overview also - it should not take too much time, we get bored, impatient, distracted and so on.

I certainly don't want to state that we should not read on screen. It really is very useful in a certain area - but if you do, observe your way of reading, look at your behaviour, at your way of handling text, and look at it with precision, as mindfully as you can. Rudolf Steiner told of his experiences with the typewriter - he was convinced that it had to enter civilisation, and he tried it out for himself. But then he describes how, in the evening after his typewriting, he perceived in an imagination that the typing fingers on the keys were beating hard on his heart. That is no reason to stop it, of course - it is only an indication that other measures should be taken to find a new balance, to maintain your health both inwardly and outwardly.

In our present time with artificial intelligence we have to face the fact that it is an inevitable development that makes great demands on us. If we don't wish to hear these demands we will have to reckon with serious damage to the highest faculty of the human race: the faculty of knowing, of our own intelligence. If we deliver this faculty devoid of will to Ahriman, intelligence will become cold and heartless and totally stripped of all freedom in thinking. By strengthening true human thinking, however, intelligence will become ever more a concrete and warm gift, connected with the heart.


The BookReading books by Mieke Mosmuller