Books, the internet, reading, and thinking

A couple years ago, I read Iain Murray’s classic biographical work on Jonathan Edwards. As I put the book away, I remember being struck at the depth of thinking produced by Edwards. A couple brief stories.

Murray recounted that Edwards would often go on journeys by means of the common mode of transportation of that day — on horseback. While atop his steed, he would muse on various topics and themes. Having neither books, nor pad and pencil, he would — in fine Puritan fashion — turn a topic over and over in his mind until new thoughts and theories developed into mature reflections. In order to not forget what he was learning, he would — as a precursor to the tradition of strings and fingers — pin small scraps of paper to his clothes to represent his various thoughts; then, when arriving at his destination (to the great amusement of his hosts or family), would carefully remove the bits of paper in the order in which they were placed on his clothing, and write down his train of thought.

I was also struck by the depth of thought produced by a man who had such a “meager” library. If memory serves correctly, his library totaled only about 400 volumes. Yet he wrote multiple volumes of books and sermons that have lasted some 300 years!

The quality of thought produced by Edwards and his kind is rare in today’s world. How could he produce so much, and at such depth?

Because he knew how to think.

And, it seems to me, while we “know” much more today in terms of facts, we know far less in terms of how to think. We have facts; we just don’t know how to think deeply or well about them.

Why is that?

Ken Myers, in a recent article entitled “That’s why they call them browsers,” reflects on another recent article in Atlantic Monthly entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Both articles are worth reading — and thinking about.

Myers, quoting another writer, notes “To a large extent man lives without depth, without a center, in superficiality and chance. No longer finding the essential within himself, he grabs at all sorts of stimulants and sensations, he enjoys them briefly, tires of them, recalls his own emptiness and demands new distractions.”

Into such a world, the Internet intrudes.

While providing much needed facts at great rates of speed, the Internet is a boon to information. And a detriment to thinking, posits Nicholas Carr in his Atlantic Monthly article. “…what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation.” He cites another blogger with a similar observation of his own habits: “I can’t read War and Peace anymore…I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

A recent study in Great Britain revealed that: “It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of ‘reading’ are emerging as users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents, pages, and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.”

That is, they (or rather, we; or even better, I) go online to gather information that we (I) do not have to process or think about deeply; just plug it into its appropriate slot of missing information and keep going.

It’s a sad state. Never have there been more books, good and old, more readily available, and never have we been more ill-equipped to digest them adequately.

All of this triggered a memory of an essay I’ve long known about, but never read. I just purchased the book that contained the essay two weeks ago. So after finishing these articles, I picked up C. S. Lewis’s God in the Dock, and read “On the Reading of Old Books.” I own many books that are worthy of being read — and thought about. All the more, it is time to read them.