As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been able to read. So much of my free time, ever since elementary school, has been spent reading. I’ve adopted a few hobbies, but I always return to reading. I’ve been thinking about the act of reading since I came across Shireen Jeejeebhoy’s article in Psychology Today about how she had to re-learn how to read after a brain injury. I don’t spend a lot of time around folks who don’t know how to read. I work at a university where reading is automatic. Even if students often struggle with the vocabulary of scholarly writing, they can glean meaning from all but the densest articles.
Years ago, I saw a tweet by Katie Oldham float around the internet. She wrote:
Ever realised how fucking surreal reading a book actually is? You stare at marked slices of tree for hours on end, hallucinating vividly[.]
The literate have learned to recognize that highly abstract symbols (in my case as an English speaker, the Latin alphabet) have meaning. These symbols, when arranged in specific combinations, can be interpreted by my brain to conjure a dragon or a heartbreak or a salty breeze or the taste of peach cobbler. Reading a well-written book really can be like vividly hallucinating. I can’t imagine my life without that ability.
Jeejeebohy reminded me of how much mental effort it takes to read. The brain has to be able to focus on small portions of written text at a time, otherwise a page is just a blur of symbols. One of the therapies Jeejeebhoy used had her try to use tools like highlighters or even other pieces of paper to re-train her brain to focus on individual words and lines. My brain sometimes gets ahead of itself when I get excited by what I’m reading. When I read a mystery or thriller, I have to force my eyes to not jump down the page to see what happens next. Apart from getting the words into your head through your eyeballs, your brain has to do the work of not only recognizing the word but also call up what that word means. The word “breeze” on its own doesn’t mean much if you don’t know what it feels like to have a soft wind brush across your face, carrying the scent of the environment around you to your nose. The name “New York” means nothing unless you know of the massive city on the east coast of the United States (another name that means nothing if you don’t know geography and history and so much more).
Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos:
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
This is what reading brings to me. And because I don’t remember the effort of learning to read, of struggling over the weird spellings of the hodgepodge that is English, of retaining the mostly unspoken rules of grammar and syntax, reading to me is an act of magic that I share with an author. They leave dark squiggles—either on a paper page or a digital one—for me to transform into images and ideas and feelings. Jeejoobhoy’s experience, then, is a powerfully grounding reminder of what it means to be able to read. I am so glad she was able to find this magic again.
I love how you expressed the wonder of reading- that such small marks on paper can reveal endless things to our minds, due to arbitrary meanings somebody long ago gave them, and we all learned. I didn’t struggle to re-learn reading like the woman you mention, but I read the article you linked to last week and found it fascinating.
Months ago I had a minor concussion and I still struggle with focus and mental stamina- so while I didn’t loose any ability to read, I can’t read the same way I used to. Novels that I would have finished in a few days, now take me several weeks. I gave up on that for now and am sticking to easier material. I feel grateful that I can still read coherently and enjoy it (for the first few weeks post injury I wasn’t allowed to read at all, and then for a while after that it was so fatiguing I had to limit how much reading I did per day, and didn’t find it enjoyable at all). I hope with time my ability will back to where it was before, but it sure has made me grateful for still being able to read at all!
-Sorry for the overly long comment-
No apology needed! Thank you for sharing! I hope you get back to where you were!
I read a book about this years ago, that explained how speech is sort of a built-in capability in humans. Babies will absorb language around them and learn to talk without any specific instruction. But writing and reading are not innate and have to be learned. Obvious, but I’d never thought about it that way. It’s crazy that we ever learned to write and read at all!
I’m fascinated by that hardwired ability to just absorb language! That might be even more magical than writing and reading, since I can totally see how writing evolved as a way to remember things. (That thought gets me to thinking about Ea-Nasir and the fact that people still make jokes about him almost 4,000 years later.)
As for the actual question: I don’t actually remember learning how to read, I picked it up so young. I could recognize words as whole entities (not having to sound them out) before I was in kindergarten. It doesn’t even feel like a skill, more like something I’ve always intuitively known. From my mother reading aloud to us every single night as kids when I was little, I suppose I just absorbed it.
This is pretty much my experience, too! My sister told me, years ago, that my nephew had a hard time with his first standardized test. He knew how to read and was baffled when he was asked to sound things out for the test: “but I can just read that!”