I was stumbling around the Huffington Post today (I know, I know) when I came across this little piece by Alex Green, the owner of an independent bookstore in Boston. Basically, he goes about contrasting the ghastly connotations of a ‘reading’ with the energy and smart conversation you often see at one.
Reflecting on his point, I think the failure he points out goes back to all the crazy and contradictory meanings of the verb ‘to read’. You can find most of those here in the Sarabande office—me staring blankly at the directions to the coffee maker, Meg flipping through Publisher’s Weekly, or Sarah going through a manuscript line by line.
When we’re talking about the spoken word, we can say that Socrates, in turn, spoke, preached, dialogued, chattered, and raved. If, on the other hand, we want to use the same structure—a does x—we can only say Plato ‘read’. No other verb is either specific or boundless enough to say, simply, ‘Plato looked at scratches, understood them as language, and responded thereto’. Naturally, if we want to move beyond that formulation, there are more options: we can say Plato skimmed, waded through, buried himself in, or pored over, Anaxagoras. But, as I think the preponderance of prepositions hints, the written word is either a syntactic obstacle (through, over) or an afterthought tagged on to a prior concept.
It seems to me that our language has not caught up with our language. In other words, though the number of everyday activities that count as ‘reading’ has exploded (the Internet, anyone?), the noun form has been pegged to the days when reading was a hieratic act. As the verb ‘to read’ has become increasingly more democratic, well, so too have most readings: we’re now at the point where a subsequent Q&A is just about understood. Still, when we embrace the loveliness of simply sitting down ‘to read’, we accept too all its problems and injustices.