A few weeks ago while listening to a podcast, I was mildly horrified to discover that experts recommend chewing each bite of food thirty-two times before swallowing. Have you ever tried counting? I have far too much pride to disclose my average number. However, I will say that I grew up with five constantly hungry brothers, and chewing more than ten times meant risking all the good food being gone and being stuck with carrots and peas. Even now, if I am honest, I generally chew distractedly while engaging all of my creativity to get the girls to eat more than crackers and cheese.
However, I have vivid memories of beautiful food moments where I was able to take the time to slowly savour and appreciate each glorious bite. A paper-thin crepe filled with warm goat cheese, spinach and apple at a small farm restaurant in Utrecht, Holland. A perfectly soft and crunchy cookie with warm spices and a hint of salt at the Halifax Public Library. The act of deeply savouring and slowly digesting each bite did not just make the food much more enjoyable, but imprinted the experience as a whole in my memory. I can still picture the cows grazing in a nearby field in Utrecht, and recall the glorious smell of a million books while slowly meandering through the isles with my friend.
I imagine deeply reading a book to be remarkably similar to mindfully chewing and savoring a meal. Literary critic Hugh Mcguire beautifully described this type of reading:
“Books, in ways that are different from visual arts, music, the radio, or even love, force us to walk through another’s thoughts one word at a time over hours and days.”
From this perspective, the act of deep reading requires things that are incredibly valuable and even scarce in modern culture. Things like time, patience, and focused attention. Which begs a pertinent question: Why continue to engage in a practice that demands so much, when I can seemingly achieve many of the same benefits at a much lower cost? Why read a newspaper from front to back when I can instantly access a thousand online news sources that give key content in bite-sized summaries? Why sacrifice hours and days to read a literary novel when Netflix neatly reduces the plot to ninety minutes of riveting camera angles and special effects? Why read a hard copy of the Bible from cover to cover when an app on my phone can send me a daily inspirational verse with a quietly aesthetic background? Why spend hours articulating and organizing my thoughts in a monthly blog post when AI could produce an article that sounds quite similar in a mere two seconds? With so much information available at the click of a button, perhaps it is inevitable that modern society is becoming post literate. As Nicholas Carr predicted fifteen years ago in his brilliant book The Shallows, people’s brains are literally losing the ability to read slowly and deeply.
It is not that we don’t read. In fact, the average person in Canada reads all day long, glancing at road signs, menus, twitter posts and advertisements. This is typically a shallow form of reading; in terms of digestion, we only chew each bite three or four times before swallowing. Shallow reading is not inherently wrong. It can be extremely helpful in managing and processing large amounts of information. However, we can lose so much when we begin to automatically approach a quality work of literature this way. When I take the time to slowly absorb the words of a book, I not only gain information, but actually enter the world of the author and temporarily merge it with my own.
I absolutely love this poem by Wallace Stevens:
The house was quiet and the world was calm
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
Not only does this work describe deep reading, but its composition demands that the reader engage in it.
I believe that the all-time bestselling book in the world, the Bible, was designed to be read like this. Not casually sampled alongside other servings of news, gossip, and positive psychology. But rather chewed, savoured and deeply absorbed. In the words of Hugh Mcguire, walking through the thoughts of God, one word at a time, through every season of life. Or as put by Wallace Stevens, entering the world of God’s Kingdom. King David describes this kind of reader:
“His delight is in the law of the Lord, And in his law he meditates day and night” (Psalm 1:2).
Jesus Himself showed an incredibly deep and comprehensive knowledge of scripture, quoting Old Testament writings not only in moments of teaching, but in moments of intense pressure. Our automatic response to a personal attack often exposes something deep within ourselves. These moments can feel revealing and at times humbling. Satan attacked Jesus at a time that he was hungry, thirsty, and alone. He targeted all the key parts of His identity. Remarkably, Jesus did not defend Himself or throw insults, but rather automatically responded by quoting scripture. This showed a deeply rooted knowledge and intimate acquaintance with words of the Old Testament writers.
What does it look like to foster a love of deep reading? If you made it to this point in the blog, you likely value this kind of focused and intentional practice. If you are anything like me, you might often feel the struggle of trying to hone a skill that the world no longer seems to value. Although social media and AI platforms can pose challenges, I am certainly do not want to paint them as entirely negative or dangerous.
Sometimes the most simple consistent practices can have a big impact over time. Like setting aside twenty minutes in a day to read a hardcopy book without technology present. My old black Bible is old and worn and cannot instantly compare other versions or provide commentary like the Bible app on my phone. But several pages in the book of Romans have salt water stains from the summer I read beside the ocean. Other pages in the Psalms have salt water stains from tears during a dark season. And many of the margins have words and thoughts scrawled in blue pen that come back to greet me like forgotten friends whenever I revisit them. There is something deeply beautiful in the physicality of a book that has been loved and revisited over time.
Another way to slow down and digest each individual word is through memorization. Learning phrases and embedding them into your mind and body through repetition. The word “memorization” might instantly bring you back to reciting cringe-worthy poems in front of your fifth grade class. Unfortunately in Western society, we tend to relegate it to childhood. In his book The Insanity of God, Nik Ripken writes about a secret Christian Youth conference that took place in Communist Russia in the early 1950s. Over the course of the conference, seven hundred young people between ages eighteen and thirty risked imprisonment to meet and encourage each other. During the conference, these young people were challenged to reconstruct the four New Testament Gospels- Matthew, Mark, Luke and John from memory. Remarkably, by the end of the conference, they had recreated all four books from memory with only a half-dozen mistakes. I find this love and passion for the Word of God in the midst of intense opposition deeply inspiring. Understandably, the mere thought of memorizing all four gospels might be completely overwhelming. But I wonder what the simple practice of memorizing even one verse every week could build in a year.
There is a time and place for speed and efficiency. Sometimes we simply have limited time to chew. And resources like AI can be incredibly helpful in these times. However, I believe that skill of deep reading is absolutely worth fighting for, and that no quantity of information can ever substitute for the quality of focused attention. I would like to sincerely thank you for showing that you value this fight by taking the time to read all the way to the very. last. word.