The room, and the art of Reading
Have you ever observed a person reading? [1] Say more than half a minute, intently observing what they do and how their body behaves?
Have you ever caught yourself reading as you were busy doing it? Do you prefer to sit hunched over, or do you lean back? Do you sit at a desk-chair, in an armchair, or lie on a coach, or a bed? Perhaps you do all of that, is there a difference? Do you wriggle about?
Zooming in, do you skip words and sentences, or do you persist and struggle determinedly, returning every time to the place in the text where you know you still had your concentration? Do you underline, make notes in the margins? Do you see the text as something alive? Do your read with an inner voice, several inner voices maybe?
Do you consume the book you read or are you very precious about it, trying to preserve the spine and making sure the pages do not curl? Do you like e-readers, or do you hate them? Do you have romantic ideas about 1st editions and so forth?
And how do the words behave as you are busy reading? Do you have a form of dyslexia? Do you have to command the letters to stay in place? And when you are in the flow, do the words conjure up images and relationships or do they stay like words that can only mean something if you do the maths?
Do you pause now and then to look up and let all you have read find its place in the greater scheme of things?
Watch St Jerome reading in their study through the window framing Antonella da Messina’s curious fictional portrait.
Antonella da Messina has given St Jerome a wooden structure in a larger cloister or church that has been purpose-built for reading.
Just as Le Corbusier characterised the house as a machine for living in, so this raised structure, lightly resting on the more permanent floor is a machine for studying. There is space for a small library (six bookshelves) in which a small collection of manuscripts and sundry objects have accreted.
The reading ledger cantilevers out dramatically towards the stately St Jerome who sits with their back straight and their concentrated gaze in their heavy desk-chair, clothed in many layers presumably to keep them warm and to indicate their status as Father of the Church.
Their arms reach out to hold the book they are busy with. They maintain their concentration by holding their body in a disciplined straight-backed pose.
On a peg around the corner hangs a white towel, presumably for after every tussle with literature. Then there is the space in which the study has been situated: a large, vaulted space with a lion wandering in the shadows and, at some distance from the viewer, windows opening out onto a blue sky filled with birds and other windows opening out onto the surrounding landscape.
One of the lower windows, the one to the left, is furnished with two small benches opposite each other, a common tradition in the palaces and cloisters of Italy that, perhaps, invite one to continue reading in a less formal setting, close to the light.
There is one other such ‘reading machine’ that I would like to draw our minds to, which is the desk designed by Lousi Kahn for the Philips Exeter Library in Yale, which is a simple affair even though the configuration of windows and screens make it a wonderful nook in which one can imagine a student settling into to begin an adventure in words.
Ingle-nooks and personal libraries or rooms such as those described by Virginia Woolf, and left behind by Michel de Montaigne, and no doubt many others, are dedicated spaces for reading, where the book being read at that moment cannot be seen in isolation of the intellectual biography of the person reading it, the book is part of a large theatre of memory stretching itself over every book read and every book waiting for its turn in the bookcase on show and becomes enriched by being considered in relation to the space it is being read in.
The references to the various aspects of reading are manifold. Walter Benjamin’s text on unpacking their library, on translation, and all the brilliant scholarly insights developed on the subject of reading from Erasmus, Sir Thomas Browne to Lewis Carrol, from Elias Canetti to Jacques Derrida, René Magritte to Marcel Broodthaers from J.L. Austen to Stanley Cavell, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino are all attempts to celebrate reading through its description, its analysis and its critique.
What kind of activity is reading? What counts as doing it? And when do you know you are doing it well? We do something like read our environment throughout our conscious and subconscious life. We do so by observing the behaviour of things forming situations and events in our conception of them. Those events are conceptually furnished according to the strength, utility and wealth of our frame of reference. Reading literature or reading an image are forms of observing that tie the observations to what you already believe you know and allowing that to affirm or change your view.
Reading the behaviour of things, reading drawings, texts and calculations is a special kind of attentive observing, let’s call it ‘parsing’, which consists of doing a number of things.
First of all, we will begin and end observing somewhere, prick up our ears to listen and then having listened, shift your attention elsewhere; begin a page on the top left-hand corner and after a while put the book down again to think about things; follow a smell and shut the door. The next step is that we change what we observe into something else. We try to get purchase on what it is we are observing and then follow paths of inference to work out one or two implications of what we observe.
At the same time, we treat the things we read as things in themselves. Letters are signs, but they are letters, and words are also just words, sentences are sentences and images are images. Each require a composition to make the magic of meaning happen.
Even if these two requirements for reading are not much different to what we do in other kinds of observing, they are essential conditions for an activity to be called reading. The letters forming words and the words forming sentences stand both for themselves as letters and words, drawings on a page, as well as forming something beyond themselves, whatever it is the are saying.
You must know what you are reading to be a language of signs. Each proposition forms a coherent set or composition of signs, that by virtue of its being a proposition is more than the sum of the individual parts. A proposition, such as an image saying ‘here this’, or a sentence giving the performance of its own meaning and a mathematical calculation following its path of inference assumes knowledge of its grammar of composing the marks in such a way that they can become signs.
It is not necessary to be fluent in a language, it is not even necessary to have an extensive, strong or sophisticated frame of reference, but there has to be a start of such a frame for you to get purchase on what you are reading, there has to be something of a conceptual framework and something of a spatio-temporal procedure for following or making paths of inference.
A mark distinguishes; dividing what there is into what it is and what it is not. Two marks compose a picture and oppose each other; three marks form a sequence. This is true for the composition of any image whether it be visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory or gustatory.
Letters and words are vehicles of information that we recognize and must be familiar with (knowing the sound of the letters composing words and the meaning of the words forming sentences).
They are, on that condition, able to induct us into the new that they are saying, which teaches us more about the world they describe as well as teaching us more about the working of the words and sentences as concepts.
In order to read we have marks that become signs when composed in certain configurations and such compositions achieve a coherence in the reader to form the thread of a story or the scaffolding of an image.
In reading we read what we recognize as signs to be confronted with compositions of them that leads to information we did not have before. At the same time, we practice and improve our language, we become better at decoding, add concepts caught in words to our frame of reference, and run the risk of habituation and routine, misunderstanding and overconfidence.
Our reading can fall into error by reading into things what may not be there or not reading deeply enough when we have arrived at the limits of our conceptual wealth. Our reading can become too rigid when we do not allow for the range of meanings a word, phrase or sentence can have depending on the context it appears in.
In reading we focus on what we see in the deliberate attempt to understand what we see for what it implies and could lead to. To read is to differentiate and synthesize to be able to analyse and critique and so investigate the elements or parts making up the whole and to construct an image of their working relationships so that we can follow implications and see possibilities.
Reading ends with the assessment of- and reflection upon what the value of what we have read is to us. That is the critical phase. All information is subjectified in this way. It is made to matter to us and/or our environment. As such, reading in a more extended sense is an activity of parsing and reflection, of focussing on the details of what you see and then leaning back and slowly giving that new information its proper place in your own view or understanding of the world and what that might imply regarding any action you undertake.
Texts and calculations have a linear composition going from left to right (at least in the European languages) and from top to bottom. Reading a drawing follows a geometry that depends upon the composition. You can read an image or composition from left to right if you choose to, but we tend to be led by the composition.
Texts and calculations are themselves a special kind of image of lines and dots organised and composed in a special configuration that we have learnt to read in a certain way. A picture or image is usually read from the most attention-grabbing element to the next attention-grabbing element and so forth, until you grasp your selection of the whole. But what it is that grabs our attention and for what reason, is not always so clear. The study of perception is a complex science and not something we shall deal with here.
When reading a space or reading a drawing we select things in their spatio-temporal relations and create a narrative logic of our reading, braiding all the bits into a personalized whole, in which everything read finds its own place that is dependent upon our conceptual abilities. That narrative logic becomes a story concluded by a feeling of satisfaction or dissatisfaction, expressed in what we think to ourselves and perhaps say to others. In the communication of what we have read or observed we reveal ourselves in our way of reading things.
Reading spaces and drawings appears a more loosely organised affair where we can start and finish where our cognitive apparatus decides for us. But to think that reading texts and calculations is only a linear effort that starts at the beginning and ends at the end is to grossly underestimate the complexity of reading a text or calculation. When I read and try to remain aware of what I am actually doing (which, I have to admit, does not always help my concentration on the actual text I am reading) I notice myself constantly going back and forth, rereading bits, looking up words in dictionaries and names in encyclopaedias, getting my head around certain phrases and idioms that mean something other than what they mean literally, I pause to try to understand the punctuation used and imagine the melody of the text as it might be read aloud. Then, sometimes inexplicably, I put the book down and stare out of the window or into the distance, not thinking anything much in particular, only to turn back and carry on reading again, looking up references, perhaps starting another book to which the earlier one referred to and finishing that before I pick up the first. Reading becomes an all-encompassing activity, an alternately divergent and convergent movement, rhizomatic in its growth of relations, of which whole chunks fall away and are forgotten about, whilst others persist in my memory because I keep on coming back to them, keep on thinking about them and try thinking with them.
Of course, I approach a light novel differently to an academic reading project and I approach non-fiction differently to fiction, poetry differently to prose. But all have their chance to move me, sway me, teach me, to get me thinking. Reading is, surely, my greatest pleasure. Furthermore, you would be surprised to hear perhaps that it is not always the most sweeping texts that stay with me. If understanding is my purpose, it matters little how lively the text is, if I can recognize its compelling explanation and so improve my model of the world, then even the convoluted sentences of Hegel are welcome although I will admit to not having understood many of them, despite trying hard. I believe that some philosophers write in difficult knotted prose because they themselves are almost lost in the cutting edge thinking they are doing, often requiring new concepts to make things covered appear. It is not the kind of philosophy I like writing, because I do get lost in my own thinking that way, so I prefer keeping to everyday words with their everyday meanings, but that is not to say I was not immensely enriched by reading Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Barthes, Deleuze and Derrida. Reading them became ‘grand’ reading projects dressed in a suitable atmosphere of ricocheting complexity and labyrinthine grandeur. Those reading projects were then offset by the delights and clarity of reading Wittgenstein, Dummett, Oswald Hanfling, J.L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, Collingwood, G.E.M Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Schopenhauer, Plato. And then there are the philosophical bureaucrats such as Brandom and Sartre, whose repetitive precision you have to admire. There is something for everyone and everyone can if they try, read anything. All it takes is the wish to and the text being ready to hand.
Texts, even scholarly and scientific ones, are stuffed with simile, metaphor, analogy, allegory, symbol, metonym, and other forms of indirect reference. Reading Hegel for instance was a very spatial experience. They use preposition and the notion of spatial sublation to position their thoughts. And of course, a written text does not have the musical intonation of a speaking voice to liven it up with emphasis, interval and crescendo, so you have to kind of put that in as well otherwise you are likely to misunderstand the text. Moreover, reading a text is just as much a selective affair as is reading your environment. You select what you notice and what you can use. The rest you discard, despite the fact that it may have been useful if you had only known how. Reading a text, just like reading any image, is a puzzling together of its intended and its potential or possible meaning. And the possible meaning in any text, image and calculation is always more than what the author of the image, text or calculation put into it.
Some people are better at reading than others, that means that they are better able to reach the full potential of meaning in a text or can see and demonstrate the existence of meaning in a text that others would not have been able to find in it.
No doubt all people, sometimes, read badly and there are some people who will always read badly. I catch myself at it occasionally. Bad reading means that the reader either cannot- or does not bother to find and reconstruct the intended meaning in a text or that the reader imposes meaning on a text that cannot reasonably be found there. Bad reading might lead to good creativity. But then it is not the text read that is benefitted, it is what is done with the text. Bad reading comes about through the possession of an impoverished and poorly maintained conceptual frame of reference, a slovenly maintained dictionary. Reading requires more than just looking up the meaning of words, it requires empathic displacement, the attempt to see things from another’s perspective. It requires you to as it were to draw a veil of ignorance by de-situating yourself and imagining being in situations other than the one you are in and seeing the practical difficulties or challenges of such a situation. It requires going beyond the text to eke out implications that are not discussed. It requires placing yourself in the text to find its practical implications for you and your environment. It requires going along with the peculiarities of phrasing and definition and deliberating your stand with regard to these.
Bad reading is a worrying activity that has led nearly all of us astray at some point in our lives. It is, moreover, impossible to write a good text for people who read badly. How would you approach such an exercise? Keeping things simple and economic, and as unambiguous as possible helps, and should be general advice to all writers, but certainly not always and to for everyone. One can take it too far; what is the point of writing something from which all profundity and nuance is taken out? The requirement of Occam’s razor can get in the way of what you really want to say, when, like truly new thinkers, the conceptual framework has not been fully formed and needs to be constructed as we go. On top of that the simplification of everything we do, removes much of the joy of playing with images, words, and numbers. Sometimes labyrinthine texts are fun precisely because they generate a unique meaning with each reader. We may demand of writers that they write clearly and unambiguously, but the writer, just like the reader is an autonomous creature. They are just as much in their right when demanding of the reader that they become good readers! Get over the fact that you have to work to read well! Just get on with it. That way you will have more fun and have a richer experience.
Take your time with reading whatever it is you want to read, and make sure you have fun doing it. Even if you are dyslexic, like me. Reading is a struggle with your understanding at the best of times. Putting the letters and symbols in their proper place and making sure you have not mistaken a ‘b’ for a ‘d’ is just part of the game.
And when you have sat all hunched up with your attentive gaze on the page, do not forget to look up and into the indeterminate distance of your mind’s eye to tie the detail of what you have just read to the greater picture you have developed of your world. Reading is forging links between what is being read and what it might mean for your acting upon the world, tying what you read to what you already know, allowing you to explore relationships between what you have read and everything and anything else. That is what makes all forms of reading a creative exploratory activity, essential to all arts.
© jacob voorthuis, 2025. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
[1] Damon Young, The Art of Reading (2018); Robert MacFarlane, The Gifts of Reading (2017); Elaine Castillo, How to Read Now (2022); Virginia Woolf, (1926, 2020) How should one read a book? Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren, How to read a book: The classic guide to Intelligent Reading (1972)