A Meal Eaten Alone
On the neglected habit of reading in company
When the people of Israel returned from exile and gathered at the Water Gate, they did not disperse, each to meditate upon the Law in private. They came together as one, and Ezra the scribe read aloud to them, from early morning until midday, while the Levites moved among the crowd and “gave the sense and helped them to understand the reading”.1 The reading and its understanding were a single, shared event. To hear the words was already to begin weighing them; the assembly was at once audience and interlocutor. No one read alone, and no one understood alone.
For most of the history of reading, this is simply what it was. The reader is often imagined as a solitary figure, bent over a page in a quiet room; but reading of that solitary kind became the common way only in recent centuries. To read was to lend a voice, or to borrow one. In the ancient world words ran together on the page without spaces between them, and a text was something one sounded out, often with the lips moving, and in the hearing of others. The Greeks and Romans gathered to hear authors recite their works. The synagogue and the early Church received Scripture as something proclaimed and then expounded; “Blessed is he who reads,” John writes, “and those who hear the words of this prophecy”.2 Centuries later the monks of Saint Benedict took their meals in silence while one brother read aloud to the rest, so that body and soul might be fed at the same table.3 Reading was a room one entered in company.
Some read in silence even then, of course, but silence is not the same as solitude. Augustine, in his Confessions, pauses to describe how his teacher Ambrose would read without moving his lips: “his eyes ran over the page and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent”.4 Augustine could only guess at the reason, supposing that Ambrose spared his voice, which easily grew hoarse, or kept himself from being drawn into questions; what stays with me is the solitude: his teacher so absorbed that he had stepped behind a closed door, present in body and yet somewhere else in spirit. This inwardness was what would spread in the centuries to come. It had been there all along; what was new was how many would choose it as a matter of course.
The shift did not happen all at once. As spaces crept between words and silent reading grew easier, and then as printing made books cheap and plentiful, reading turned inward. Historians sometimes call it a reading revolution: a move away from reading a few books slowly and in common—the Bible above all, returned to again and again—toward reading many books quickly and alone, most of them passed through once and set aside. Reading became, by degrees, less an act of formation than an act of consumption. The shared room emptied into the solitary armchair.
And yet the solitude was not only a loss. Behind that closed door grew privacy, and the inner life it shelters. There a reader could think a thought no one had assigned him, out of reach of the crowd and the censor. It was no small thing to have won. But what began as a room of one’s own became, for many of us, the only room.
We are, most of us, the Ethiopian official on the desert road, riding alone, reading the prophet Isaiah aloud, unable to make sense of what lies before him. “How can I,” he says, “unless someone guides me?”5 It is an honest admission, and an old one: that a text, by itself, is not enough. In his case a companion is sent to his side, who asks whether he understands what he reads, climbs in beside him, and stays until the reading has become a conversation that changes his life. We, by contrast, tend to travel sealed away from one another, and no one climbs in to ask. Most of what we read now is the day’s churn of feeds and messages, taken in once and swiped away. We read more than any generation before us, and we read more alone than any generation before us. Quantity, I’d venture, is what we reach for when communion is gone.
The longing to read together has not died; only the habit has. We might notice this at the end of a chapter, when we look up to say something and find no one beside us. We see it still, wherever people gather around a text: in book clubs and seminar rooms, and in the notes we leave in the margin for someone else to find. What we lack is the everyday occasion, now that the shared room has grown rare and our books have scattered onto a thousand private screens.
It is this longing, in part, that I have spent these past months trying to answer. What I have built is a web app. It is not a way back to paper, as if the screen could be easily abandoned, nor a way to keep reading alone on it. I think of it instead as a long digital table, a place where reading might again be shared, where the conversation can live in the margin, where it belongs. A book is a meal the author has set before us, and it was never meant to be eaten alone.
P.S. Although I have not yet launched my app publicly (I am waiting on the IRS, of all things!), I am looking for people who would like to try it out and give me feedback. If this is something you're interested in, you can leave a comment or send me a direct message (or, if you're reading this in your inbox, simply reply).
Nehemiah 8:8, Orthodox Study Bible (hereafter OSB).
Revelation 1:3, OSB.
The Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 38.
Augustine, Confessions 6.3, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford University Press, 1991).
Acts 8:31, OSB.