As I continue to think about kinds of reading and readers, I turned to C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism today. The book’s entire premise is that it’s easier to talk about differences among kinds of readers instead of kinds of books.
In the book’s second chapter, Lewis makes clear that people who love reading (“the few”) are not morally superior to those who do not love reading (“the many”). He also makes clear that not everyone who seems to be part of “the few” is really in that number. We have the professional and the status seeker to deal with.
Lewis describes the professional this way:
Perhaps they once had the full response, but the ‘hammer, hammer, hammer on the hard, high road’ has long since dinned it out of them. I am thinking of unfortunate scholars in foreign universities who cannot ‘hold down their jobs’ unless they repeatedly publish articles each of which must say, or seem to say, something new about some literary work; or of overworked reviewers, getting through novel after novel as quickly as they can, like a schoolboy doing his ‘prep’.
This certainly is a temptation for me, where every book turns into prep or gets scanned evaluated for how it can best contribute to a conference paper, journal article, or book project.
Lewis describes the status seeking reader this way.
As there are, or were, families and circles in which it was almost a social necessity to display an interest in hunting, or county cricket, or the Army List, so there are others where it requires great independence not to talk about, and therefore occasionally to read, the approved literature, especially the new and astonishing works, and those which have been banned or have become in some other way subjects of controversy. Readers of this sort, this ‘small vulgar’, act in one respect exactly like those of the ‘great vulgar’. They are entirely dominated by fashion.
This is also a temptation for me. I’m constantly hovering over the books “I’m supposed to read.” Lewis contrasts the status seeking reader with a boy who may be having the home’s “where a small boy is reading Treasure Island under the bed-clothes by the light of an electric torch.”
This kind of relationship to reading holds for the Bible as much as it does works of literature, and I pray for the eagerness and absorption of a child when I approach God’s word.