Reading as Dialogue

Metropolitan Saba Isper’s recent article “Guidance on Reading” has struck a harmonious chord in my mind. Perhaps this is because I have spent the last handful of months developing a collaborative reading app, an endeavor that has demanded continuous reflection on the nature and purpose of reading.

Reading is often conceived as a solitary affair: finding a quiet place to meditate upon a text privately, for one’s own pleasure and profit. This is certainly good and often necessary, since a still mind is required for effective listening. For when we read, another person is speaking to us, and truly hearing another is anything but passive. I’d venture to say that reading—a living loop of speaking, hearing, and internal response—is properly characterized as dialogue.

A dialogue, simply understood, is a meaningful exchange between two or more persons. Reading, though an indirect form, fits this definition. And except perhaps in the case of genuinely private correspondence, we should resist the urge to view this dialogue as a closed one. The texts we read are typically known and available not only to the author and an individual reader but to myriad others besides. In this way, reading opens at least the possibility of dialogue with all who have encountered the same words. It follows that one of the implicit purposes of writing is to bring readers into conversation with one another. As purposeful readers, we ought to fulfill this call, drawing out the fullness of a text by speaking with one another about it.

Conversation about a book is something like a shared meal that the author has set before us. The text sets the table; the readers bring themselves. Perhaps this structural kinship is why good conversation so often arises over a good meal: both are occasions for receiving something offered, for letting a common offering give rise to attention, response, and exchange. A book read only in isolation is a meal eaten alone: nourishing, certainly, but missing some essential dimension of what a meal truly is.

If we approach reading less as an isolated exercise in self-edification and more as preparation for quality conversation with others, I suspect we may even find more benefit for ourselves along the way. We read with sharper attention when we read in view of conversation: we mark passages, weigh claims, notice what surprises us, because we anticipate sharing it. The text becomes not just something consumed but something digested and transformed, ready to be set before others in a spirit of communion.