Silent reading in public life
ARE YOU MOVING your lips as you read this? Do you put your forefinger under each word as you decipher it? Is your tongue between your teeth, perched on your lower lip? Those are physical characteristics of the very young reader. Why did your teachers cure you of such external manifestations of the mental work of reading? As you learned to read, in fact, you recapitulated the historic evolution of this activity, a shift from the physical realm to the utterly interior space of contemplation; from rote and imitation to invention. Reading, as you do it now, is internal. Your eyes move, but nothing else does.
In the ancient world, texts were read aloud, not silently. The mind grasped the meaning of words as much through the ear as the eye, and the full body was engaged in the act. This was made necessary by the technology of text. The scroll and codex were rare objects, unavailable to most people, so groups gathered to hear them read. Even when alone, readers read aloud. On the page, the words were not separated, as here, and there was no punctuation, which meant that the reader had to depend on prior knowledge to make sense of the run-on letters. That knowledge was gained by having heard others read before. Vocalizing was the way in which text could initially be understood, and memorization was the way that understanding could be passed on.
But then something happened. At a certain point humans began to read silently and in privacy. Vocalization and memorization gave way to quiet reflection. "Silence!" became the librarian's command. Soon, that silence was enshrined in the spaces and punctuation marks that made each single reader the master-decoder of written language. A revolution occurred not only in the way texts were regarded, but in the way consciousness was formed. The scholar Brian Stock points to the most famous example of this shift: One day, as reported in "The Confessions," the young Augustine noticed that his mentor, Ambrose, was reading a book without moving his lips. "We saw him reading silently, and never otherwise." What Augustine saw in Ambrose was an instance of pure interiority, reading as entry into a contemplative world. Augustine here embraced the philosophical ideal that would define him from then on -- inner life as absolute. His conversion followed.
Where before, Augustine had regarded the Bible as the word of God, now he understood that the text of Scripture does not become the word until it enters the believer's consciousness . This marked a move away from authoritarian literalism to the imaginative autonomy of the intelligent reader. Here is the most important implication of reading as a wholly interior act: To perceive is to interpret. Truth has no meaning apart from its meaning in the reader's mind. Silent reading is thus both the sign of and a means to self-awareness, with the knower taking responsibility for what is known.
This inescapable individualism is the bedrock principle of democracy, a form of social organization that became possible only when contemplative reading was widely enabled by the mass production of the printing press, and the popular education that followed. With every person able to read in the mode of Ambrose, the genius of Ambrose could belong to all. But democracy assumes the protection of the values that contemplative reading makes possible -- the self-awareness of citizens, their privacy, their capacity for willed interiority. Only because of such reading is each one a center of knowing, thinking, choosing, and acting. But what happens to consciousness when such values are put at risk?
That is the question today. Once again, as occurred when the scroll became the book, innovations in technology that change the primal experience of reading are causing a shift in consciousness. Words on a subtly flickering screen come to the eye differently than from the page, and who knows yet what that difference does? The main note of interaction between readers and what is read electronically has become interruption, since the Internet, e-mail, instant messaging, talk radio, and even audio books all assume a simultaneous multiplicity of experience. Mutations inevitably follow in the way humans relate to language. Privacy, meanwhile, is undercut by government intrusion, shrinking the meditative realm. The busy ness of daily life wars against the tranquil mind. It may be too soon to know what all of this is doing to us, but before this era ends, don't be surprised to find your lips moving once again.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
