Recovering the Lost Art of Reading E-Book

Leland Ryken

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A Christian Perspective on the Joys of Reading Reading has become a lost art. With smartphones offering us endless information with the tap of a finger, it's hard to view reading as anything less than a tedious and outdated endeavor. This is particularly problematic for Christians, as many find it difficult to read even the Bible consistently and attentively. Reading is in desperate need of recovery. Recovering the Lost Art of Reading addresses these issues by exploring the importance of reading in general as well as studying the Bible as literature, offering practical suggestions along the way. Leland Ryken and Glenda Faye Mathes inspire a new generation to overcome the notion that reading is a duty and instead discover it as a delight.

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“No one more than Christians should appreciate and cultivate the reading of well-written words. Yet, with so much else vying for our attention, many today have forgotten—or perhaps never really learned—how to read with care and skill the words that have shaped human history for thousands of years. Whether you are a student, teacher, parent, or pastor, Recovering the Lost Art of Reading will instruct and delight you in God’s wonderful gift of language and literature.”

Karen Swallow Prior, Research Professor of English and Christianity and Culture, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; author, On Reading Well

“In this literate but accessible book, Leland Ryken and Glenda Faye Mathes first rescue true literature from the trash heap of ‘text’ to which it has been confined for the last half century and then provide their readers with tools for engaging fully with the goodness, truth, and beauty of the imaginative poetry and prose of the past and present.”

Louis Markos, Professor of English and Scholar in Residence, Houston Baptist University; author, From Achilles to Christ and Literature: A Student’s Guide

“Both practical and inspirational, Recovering the Lost Art of Reading deserves a wide audience. May it spur us, as ‘people of the book,’ to slow down and savor the riches of literature and the great gift of literacy.”

Janie Cheaney, Senior Writer, WORLD magazine

“Thoughtful, challenging, and even harrowing, Recovering the Lost Art of Reading persuasively exhorts us to recover the serenity, joy, and wonder of serious reading. Those who seriously engage this book will find themselves blessedly refreshed, educated, and motivated to pursue the good, the true, and the beautiful.”

David V. Urban, Professor of English, Calvin University; author, Milton and the Parables of Jesus

Recovering the Lost Art of Reading

Recovering the Lost Art of Reading

A Quest for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful

Leland Ryken and Glenda Faye Mathes

Recovering the Lost Art of Reading: A Quest for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful

Copyright © 2021 by Leland Ryken and Glenda Faye Mathes

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Cover design: Amanda Hudson, Faceout Studios

Cover image: Getty Images

First printing 2021

Printed in the United States of America

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the King James Version of the Bible. Public domain.

All emphases in Scripture quotations have been added by the authors.

Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-4335-6427-7 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-6430-7 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-6428-4 Mobipocket ISBN: 978-1-4335-6429-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ryken, Leland, author. | Mathes, Glenda Faye, author. 

Title: Recovering the lost art of reading : a quest for the true, the good, and the beautiful / Leland Ryken and Glenda Faye Mathes. 

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index. 

Identifiers: LCCN 2020025538 (print) | LCCN 2020025539 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433564277 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781433564284 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433564291 (mobi) | ISBN 9781433564307 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Books and reading. | Bible as literature. 

Classification: LCC Z1003 .R98 2020 (print) | LCC Z1003 (ebook) | DDC 028/.9—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025538

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025539

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2021-02-05 09:14:17 AM

To our respective spouses, Mary Ryken and David Mathes, whose partnership in the gospel enlivens our earthly pilgrimages.

Contents

Introduction: Welcome to the Conversation

Part 1

Reading Is a Lost Art

 1  Is Reading Lost?

 2  What Have We Lost?

 3  Why Consider Reading an Art?

Part 2

Reading Literature

 4  What Is Literature?

 5  Why Does Literature Matter?

 6  What Does Literature Offer?

 7  Reading Stories: Tell Me a Story

 8  Reading Poems: Songs of the Soul

 9  Reading Novels: Come Away with Me

10  Reading Fantasy: A Far Journey

11  Reading Children’s Books: Once Upon a Time

12  Reading Creative Nonfiction: To Tell the Truth

13  Reading the Bible as Literature: Words of Delight

Part 3

Recovering the Art of Reading

14  Recovery through Discovery

15  Truth in Literature

16  The Moral Vision in Literature

17  Beauty in Literature

18  Discovering Literary Excellence

19  Freedom to Read

20  Reading Good Books

21  Calling and Creativity

22  Literature and the Spiritual Life: Over and Above

Notes

General Index

Scripture Index

Introduction

Welcome to the Conversation

Perhaps you’re wondering about this book’s title. Does reading need to be recovered? What makes it an art? And is it really lost? After all, here you are—reading a book.

These are fair questions, which Recovering the Lost Art of Reading seeks to answer. Its three progressive parts address first the concept of reading as a lost art, then distinctive features of various types of literature and tips for reading them, and finally, ideas for ways to recover reading.

While this book shares aspects of literary theory, it is far from an academic tome. Although it teems with practical suggestions, it isn’t a how-to book with numbered steps to reading success. It’s a guidebook by two seasoned and enthusiastic reading travelers, who show all readers—from those who rarely pick up a book to English majors and everyone between—how to discover more delight in the reading journey.

Perhaps you’re reading more than ever, on Facebook or Twitter or blog posts or websites, primarily on your smartphone. But the plethora of cyber information is not generating genuine joy in your soul. Kitten videos may be endearing but not enduring.

Society does little to help shape timeless values. Manufactured and manipulated news reports convey inaccuracies. Politicians and celebrities promote immorality. Bleak architecture and tawdry images surround us.

In today’s technology-driven and value-bereft culture, reading has become a lost art. But it’s an art that can be recovered and enjoyed by anyone, no matter what the individual’s educational level or literary experience. Join us on a journey that will open your eyes and hearts to reading that delights your soul with the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Part 1

Reading Is a Lost Art

2

What Have We Lost?

A well-known insurance company showcased a series of TV ads around the punch line, “We know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two.” Having been a college English professor for over half a century, I (Leland) have also seen a thing or two.

One memorable occasion relates directly to this chapter’s question. A student seated in my office announced he could not justify reading Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations during his last semester in college, preferring instead to spend time with his friends. I’ve often pondered and lamented what he lost by refusing to read a work of literature that may have had far-reaching and positive influence on his life.

The incident brings to my mind two statements by famous authors that guide our discussion of specific reading losses. In the penultimate paragraph of An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis writes,

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world.1

Lewis makes the bold claim that a lack of reading limits a person’s vision and experience.

Three centuries earlier, Francis Bacon stated the same truth in a positive way. In his essay “Of Studies,” Bacon said that reading makes a full person, conference (or conversation) a ready person, and writing an exact person.2 Lewis and Bacon help us to sense the richness we miss by not reading or not reading well.

Loss of Meaningful Leisure

Reading is by its very nature a leisure time activity. Although some people speak of reading as a compulsion and something they cannot live without, reading is usually something we do after we’ve handled life’s routine physical and social demands.

Through the centuries, certain words dignified the sphere known as leisure. With the decline of reading and parallel activities, words that once elevated leisure have become debased. Recreation, for example, once denoted re-creation—the renewal of the human spirit. This lofty ideal has now shrunk to the point where the word may convey a “rec room” with a ping-pong table and large-screen TV, or a community recreation commission that provides sports programs for children of all ages, or a Recreational Vehicle (RV) for camping with all the comforts of home. While there’s nothing wrong with games or sports or traveling, these newer uses of the term recreation all fall short of the former ideal of re-creation.

The term entertainment has suffered a similar diminishment. It once meant a pleasurable activity that people pursued in their free time. The Latin word for hold was part of the word’s origin, implying that the activity involved had the power to rivet one’s attention. To our surprise, we discovered that the word amusement was a synonym for entertainment, so that as late as 1920, T. S. Eliot defended the reading of literature as being “superior amusement.”3 Today, entertainment suggests a Hollywood celebrity world, and amusement is associated with a comedy show or a park with rides.

Leisure has lost its dignity. The word’s etymology implies its higher reaches. Roots of the word leisure denote time free from necessary occupation with connotations of expanding potential and enrichment. A Christian leisure theorist aptly summarizes these concepts: “Leisure is the growing time for the human spirit. Leisure provides the occasion for learning and freedom, for growth and expression, for rest and restoration, for rediscovering life in its entirety.”4

In contrast to this original and lofty standard, our culture (including the Christian segment of it) has drifted toward reducing leisure to mere diversion and distraction. Of course leisure cannot be exclusively mental and sedentary; we also need physical and relational activities. But discarding contemplative reading, once the staple of leisure in the English-speaking world, has diminished personal and cultural enrichment.

Most leisure pursuits today do not grow the human spirit. They often fail to engage the mind and imagination (the re-creating element). Staring at a smartphone for hours does not even meet the minimum requirement for leisure, a break from obligations. A Christian publisher releasing a book titled Still Bored in a Culture of Entertainment shows that believers struggle with boredom alongside unbelievers.5 Artfully reading a wide range of good books is an antidote to boredom and fosters spiritual growth. Literature refreshes at deeper levels than many other leisure activities. God wants us to be all that we can be, in our leisure as well as in our work.

Loss of Self-Transcendence

As we immerse ourselves in the reading experience, we forget self-centered concerns and thoughts. We rise above ourselves to focus on other people or large themes or even God. This experience is best labeled as self-transcendence, despite the term’s occasionally spiritualistic uses.

Getting beyond ourselves involves not only self-forgetfulness but also leaving behind our daily preoccupations: worries, work, relationships, and the myriad of regular concerns. Our human constitution requires breaks from burdensome reality. Constant immersion in obligation can make us feel joyless, irritable, and oppressed.

Biblical wisdom promotes the concept of rest. Christians generally are aware of work as a calling from God but often are ignorant that leisure is also a calling. After six days of creation, God “rested from all his work that he had done” (Gen. 2:3) and “was refreshed” by that rest (Ex. 31:17). As image-bearers, our calling is clear: our lives are incomplete if we do not follow God’s lead in balancing work with leisure. Rest from labor becomes a direct command in the Decalogue: “Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work” (Ex. 20:9–10). God ordained rest as an opportunity to rise above the self by focusing on fellowship with others and God.

One of the best ways of resting from routine can be found in reading. While physical exercise temporarily removes us from the workaday world, it does not take us “out of ourselves.” On the flip side, watching television diverts our minds from daily obligations, but most television and other forms of screen time can hardly be dignified with the lofty ideal of self-transcendence. Much of the time that people formerly used for reading is now spent staring at screens, primarily the ubiquitous smartphone.

Little of this screen time represents the health-giving act of forgetting self and identifying with something beyond normal experience. Literary scholar Helen Gardner praises the reading of literature for the way in which it “wonderfully distracts us from our self-concern [and] takes us out of ourselves, restoring . . . us.”6 Our failures to read and read well have deprived us of an essential way to transcend our confining world of private preoccupations and worries.

Loss of Beauty

One source of beauty is nature. Another is the arts, including literature. If we do not read, we have lost a primary avenue for fostering our sense of beauty. Is this important?

As with leisure, the Bible clearly shows that God wants us to have beauty in our lives. God created a world that is beautiful as well as useful. The garden he planted for our first parents was not only “good for food” but also “pleasant to the sight” (Gen. 2:9). In the New Testament, Jesus’s discourse against anxiety and greed (Matt. 6:25–34) includes the command to “consider the lilies of the field,” which is a call to contemplate beauty. At the literary level, the writer of Ecclesiastes informs his readers that he “sought to find words of delight” (Eccles. 12:10).

God intends human life to be abundant, and this includes fulfilling our God-implanted desire for the beautiful. Abraham Kuyper wrote that “as image-bearer of God, man possesses the possibility both to create something beautiful, and to delight in it.”7 Unfortunately, the long-time cultural trend has been to cauterize people’s capacity for beauty through neglect of it. We see this trend in the bland, prosaic language of our church music and colloquializing translations of the Bible. One way we can reclaim a biblical view of beauty is by reading great literature and connecting with visual art and masterpieces of music.

Too often, the Internet and modern advertising fill our minds and imaginations with images of the cheap and tawdry. Literature and the arts can enlarge our spirits with images of greatness and beauty.

Loss of Contact with the Past

Although modern and contemporary eras have produced great literature, the bulk of it comes to us from the past. A weighty consideration for Christians is that their sacred book and salvation’s redemptive acts are rooted in the past. But there is more to the picture than this principial one.

Matthew Arnold, a Victorian-era apologist for culture, bequeathed a marvelous formula when he said that to live a full life we need to be acquainted with “the best that is known and thought in the world.”8 A majority of the best that has been thought and said and produced in the arts comes from the past. We are more likely to find the true, the good, and the beautiful in classics of history than in contemporary and modern art. We need to be clear here that it is not the “pastness” of literature that makes it worthy. It is the presence of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Additionally, acquaintance with the past liberates us from bondage to the contemporary. C. S. Lewis has written on this with his usual good sense. In an essay titled “Learning in War-time,” Lewis asserts that “we need intimate knowledge of the past,” not because “the past has any magic about it, but because we . . . need something to set against the present.” Then he shares the following analogy: “A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the [person who knows the past] has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.”9

Other literary scholars have sounded the same note. Northrop Frye claimed that when we read literature from the past “we are led into a different kind of culture, with unfamiliar assumptions, beliefs, and values,” and that contact with this unfamiliar world “is what expands our own view of human possibilities.”10Wendell Berry writes about the past as something we need to “commune with, to speak with,” and that if “we remove this sense of continuity, we are left with the thoughtless present tense.”11

The decline of reading has led to the loss of the stabilizing influence and enriching treasures from the past. They speak with an outside voice into the repressive tyranny of the secular and politically-correct present.

Loss of Contact with Essential Human Experience

A leading theme throughout this book is that literature testifies to the human experience. The loss of reading leads to a disconnection with biblical and bedrock aspects of humanity.

The first benefit of connecting with the portrayal and analysis of human experience in literature is an increased understanding of life. We erroneously assume daily living automatically leads to an understanding of essential human experience. The situation is nearly the reverse: we are too harried by life’s demands to fully understand the first principles of living and of human nature. As literature projects human experience, we see our own lives more clearly and accurately. In this way, the literary enterprise shapes and forms us. The very nature of reading is contemplation of the human experience and the world in which it exists.

Self-understanding and a sense of self-identity also accompany such reading. At a commemorative ceremony at the tomb of Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel in 1924, Felix Timmermans said something that is true of literature as well as of painting: “In your work are reflected . . . our joys and our sorrows, our strengths and our weaknesses. . . . You are our mirror; in order to know . . . what we are, we have only to thumb through the book of your art, and we can know ourselves.”12 To live well, we need to know who we are.

Another dimension is the human urge for expression. We want our longings and fears to be given a voice. We desire our experiences to be registered. This explains why authors and painters and musicians ply their trade, and why the public seeks out their offerings. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay, “The Poet,” observed that “all [people] live by truth and stand in need of expression.”13 The problem is that “adequate expression is rare.” Literary authors become our representatives, “sent into the world to the end of expression,” articulating our deepest feelings better than we can.

Literature can also serve a corrective function in its portrayal of human experience. The universality and broad expanse of literature, past and present, gradually builds up within readers an awareness of enduring values and norms for living. Literature keeps calling us back to the basics, which are discernible under the details of a literary work. William Faulkner, in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, said that the literary author’s task is to call humanity back to “the old verities and truths of the heart . . . love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Without that foundation, “any story is ephemeral and doomed.”14 Life itself is ephemeral if we do not connect with permanent principles of existence.

Another way literature serves as corrective is in its archetypes. These are literature’s recurrent master images and motifs. It is no exaggeration to call archetypes the building blocks of the literary imagination. Authors cannot avoid them if they try. But the reason archetypes are everywhere in literature is that they are everywhere in life. Psychologist Carl Jung, who helped establish the modern understanding of archetypes, championed the view that the human race shares common psychic responses to certain universal images and patterns. These images “make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them.”15 Reading literature is a primary activity in our return.

The portrayal of human experience in literature also reflects a celebratory aspect. Recognizing our experiences creates a sense of personal identity. We feel “this is who we are.” That identity is not all good, but it is authentic. Christians are familiar with the act of confession, both confessing what we’ve done wrong and professing what we believe. Literature is a confession of the human race. We have a stake in it.

Entering the world of literature can accurately be labeled as “welcome to the human race.” All it takes to accept the invitation is to read a book or poem. To reject the invitation is to live in a diminished world, not fully participating in literature’s understanding and affirmation of human experience.

Loss of Edification

While we have many sources of edification in our lives, we lose an important source by not reading literature. Christian readers naturally gravitate to literature that affirms a biblical viewpoint and portrays Christian experience, but such writings should not constitute our entire reading diet. On the other hand, something is wrong when Christians immerse themselves in material that assaults rather than supports their biblical values. The songs of Zion are better than the songs of Babylon. Following the promptings of the Holy Spirit, when Christian readers take stock of what reading means to them personally, most will identify reading as a major source of spiritual input. Christian writers become spokespersons for the faith, and readers celebrate the truth these authors express. After his conversion, one-time British atheist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that “books like Resurrection and The Brothers Karamazov give me an almost overpowering sense of how uniquely marvelous a Christian way of looking at life is, and a passionate desire to share it.”16

In addition to the literature of Christian affirmation, literature that affirms a biblical viewpoint, there is an even larger body of literature that we can call the literature of common experience. It does not espouse a specifically Christian view of life, but it is entirely congruent with Christianity. In fact, much of this literature is written by Christians. This literature embodies general truth, not distinctively Christian truth. It is the communal wisdom of the human race, made possible by God’s common grace bestowed on all humanity. What is edifying about immersing ourselves in literature of common experience? General truth is genuine truth, and Christians “rejoice with the truth” (1 Cor. 13:6) wherever they find it.

At the far end of the literary continuum, we find the literature of unbelief—literature that contradicts what the Christian faith asserts. We would not say that such literature is edifying, but our encounter with it can be. As we resist what is being commended to us, we celebrate what we have in Christ. Reading modern literature of despair can make us even more aware of our joy in the Lord. Literature categories edify in different ways, but most reading experiences can be edifying if we read self-consciously as Christians. Not reading prevents these new avenues of edification from developing in our lives.

Loss of an Enlarged Vision

Our concluding item in this inventory of losses occasioned by the decline of reading brings us back to where we started, the idea that a non-reader “inhabits a tiny world,” while reading produces a full person.17C. S. Lewis advocated a theory of literature that became widely accepted. In brief, Lewis believes that “we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.”18

Reading is not the only way to enlarge our fund of experiences. Traveling or conversation or television viewing can do so as well. But reading has some built-in advantages. One is the transport by which we can access a world of experiences and viewpoints different from our own and those of our contemporary world. All it requires is opening a book. Compared to the vast sweep of viewpoints and experiences represented by literature through the ages, our community and contemporary books comprise a very tiny circle.

We need to consider not only the quantity of experiences in literature but also their quality. Literature is a realm of the imagination. Anything is possible. Imagination instantly takes us farther than any travel in the real world. It frees us from time and place and ushers us into an expansive world. Few events in life give us anything close to literature’s beauty and range of style. Most activities, like a visit to the local coffee shop, confine us to the mundane and prosaic. The human spirit craves the emancipation of excursions into the imaginative realm created by eloquent wordsmiths.

Literature not only imitates the world around us, as classical art theory promoted but adds to our world’s materials. Literary authors are sub-creators under God. For avid readers, many of the places and events and characters of an invented world are more real, more inspiring, and more interesting than the local grocery store and the people in it. Individuals who know only the actual things live in a shrunken world.

What Have We Lost?

The decline of reading has impoverished our culture and individual lives. We have lost mental sharpness, verbal skills, and ability to think and imagine. Our leisure has little meaning, and we’re consumed with self. We fail to recognize beauty or the value of either the past or essential human experience. We suffer from a lack of edification and a shrunken vision.

Too many people drift aimlessly in a rowboat without oars when they could be sailing on a fully-equipped cruise ship, feasting on delicious food, visiting fascinating ports of call, lounging on white beaches, and diving into an amazing underwater world. Sadly, they may not even realize what they’re missing.

3

Why Consider Reading an Art?

During the year before I (Glenda) began attending Pella Christian Grade School, I cried every morning my older brother and sister boarded the big, yellow school bus. I’d sit on the basement steps, watching my mother manually feed wet laundry through the washing machine wringer. As water poured from squeezed blue jeans, tears streamed down my cheeks. I repeatedly begged, “When will I learn how to read?” Mom calmly answered, “When you go to school.”

The following year, my first stop each morning in the Kindergarten room was the teacher’s desk. I’d ask, “When will we learn to read?” Mrs. Vander Wiel invariably replied, “As soon as we finish our Think and Do books.”

We eventually completed those wretched workbooks and took them home at Christmas break. When returning after the new year, my excitement ran high. Today, I thought. Today I’m finally going to learn how to read!

My anticipation was justified. I didn’t even bother to question my teacher because a stack of Dick and Jane readers sat on her desk. After our classroom’s usual beginning formalities, she turned to the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk. “Today, class, we’re going to learn how to read.” I squirmed in my seat at the half-moon table I shared with another girl.

Mrs. Vander Wiel formed white letters on the chalkboard. “Today, we’re going to learn how to read ‘Oh’ and ‘Look.’”

Oh? Look? That’s it? My spirit plummeted into my black and white saddle shoes. I already know how to read those two words!

Perched on the arm of an upholstered chair in our living room, following along as my mother read aloud or as siblings rehearsed catechism answers, I’d learned how to read without realizing it.