Congruous Incongruities
Dear Reader,
I am paraphrasing here, but philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has noted that most dilemmas emerge because of some error in the past. Well, I’m about to introduce a sort of dilemma—really a paradox—and it is indeed one that emerges only if there is a temporal error.
Much of this series has been themed or exploring the thoughts of others. I’ve added my own stories to flesh those pieces out, but I don’t think I’ve overloaded with categories or themes that are uniquely my own. I don’t think I’m particularly original that way—even if I have discovered some reading insight, it’s likely that I’ve merely rediscovered something already known but that I’d never encountered in my own reading. And that’s a fairly humble discovery.
These next two bits are also along those lines, though they are ones I’ve made my own in certain ways. They are two things that schools should teach (and sometimes claim to teach, but then undermine by how their instruction is practiced). The best teachers do inhabit these two considerations and instill them in their students. (And here I cannot claim to be among these best teachers, because I don’t believe I’ve consistently instilled them in students myself.)
Here are the two things dexterous readers keep in mind:
1) I can and should understand this; I just need to keep grinding away at it.
2) It’s okay if I don’t understand all of this as long as I attempt it.
Taken to their extreme, these statements cannot be held simultaneously. And yet without them, both of them, readers will never get as far as they might.
The order could possibly go this way for most benefit:
Pre-read (the motivational speech)
1) It’s okay if I don’t understand all of this as long as I attempt it.
Mid-read (get that grit)
2) I can and should understand this; I just need to keep grinding away at it.
Post-read (what emerged?)
3) It’s okay if I didn’t understand all of this as long as I attempted it.
For the part that’s essentially repeated in 1) and 3), what does this look like? Well, I often tell students this story, and I’ll tell this story about fifteen more times these next two weeks. The first time I read Stephen Booth’s Precious Nonsense, I think I understood about 65% of it, maybe 75% if I’m being overly generous. Five months later, I was teaching it to two different sets of students, though one of the two sets was essentially reading alongside me, so the stakes were a little lower in that case.
Still, I’d decided to read the culminating work of one of the world’s greatest Shakespearean scholars, and I read it without warmup (this was dumb) or background beyond a short intro piece from a science magazine (this was also dumb).
Yet I was also aware of my stupidity: I knew I was likely to be intellectually outclassed. (If I’d known exactly how much, I’d not have attempted the work, but that’s another matter.) I also knew that you only get to struggle with greatness on rare occasion. And if you catch only a glimmer of greatness, or what a great mind has seen, that’s better than mucking around with things that don’t inspire or challenge you.
As exhausting as Stephen Booth is to read, and he does tax the mind (or at least mortal ones like mine), leveling up to works like Precious Nonsense lets you do two things: fail gloriously and learn more than you ever could otherwise.
The number of books I’ve half understood is fairly large. And I don’t mean because a classroom teacher has some pet theory that will unearth those books’ treasures. I mean because I haven’t had the background knowledge to help me with a particular genre or author. I mean because my brain wasn’t ready for reading that day. I mean because whew-that-read-was-a-conceptual-beast-that-I’d-need-a-second-brain-to-process.
All of which is to say, sometimes you aren’t ready for a read. Sometimes you have to take on that exact read to ready yourself for it—the reading of it makes you ready for it. Or the reading of it shakes something loose so that you can read others in that genre. And what’s shaken loose is precisely why we can say, “It’s okay if I don’t understand all of this as long as I attempt it.”
That, of course, leads us to the second statement we should keep in mind while reading:
“I can and should understand this; I just need to keep grinding away at it.”
I took on Stephen Booth’s Precious Nonsense thinking precisely this. (I’m happy to report that after teaching it more than a hundred times and reading much of it the same number, and the whole thing through at least ten times, I now understand nearly 95% of it.) I gritted my teeth and kept going.
This is, in fact, what so many educators seem to mean when they talk about the value of grit. It’s that ability to keep going, believing that beating your head against a metaphorical concrete wall will result in something other than brain damage. (Here’s where those of my acquaintance will be tempted to chime in with snickers and other comments on the state of my own wits. Duly noted.)
For those who’ve read Tara Westover’s Educated, there are a number of things that probably stood out to you. A number stood out to me. But one that stood out to me and perhaps only me—though any literacy specialists worth their salt should have had the same reaction—was when I found out that she had as her reading material 19th-century religious texts to study, and that was it. Like, it was figure those out as part of learning how to read or don’t learn how to read.
And she decided to sit down with these unwieldy and weird texts, foreign in cadence and dialect, and read them. And read them because they had to eventually make sense. When I read that part of her memoir, I immediately thought, “Well of course she became a successful intellectual. If you can beat your head against dense texts for that long, knowing that you can’t understand them but demanding of yourself that you can, telling yourself that you must, you will learn to read and read better than almost anyone else.” Because that sort of grind isn’t logical. That sort of grind isn’t intellectually humble, not in the way we are often taught humility, anyway. That sort of grind isn’t normal. And that sort of grind is the source of true outliers.
(Lest it seem that I am equating myself with Westover’s greatness, I’ve never neared her level of grind. I’ve just had some pale echoes, so I understand it. I’ve also had a small number of students who’ve hit that level of grind, but I don’t think any of them are readers of this humble newsletter, even if all my current and former students might think the hours I’ve demanded of them are equivalent to Westover’s grind. Hours of study are not the same thing.)
That level of grind, and the accompanying mentality of “I can understand this thing,” is also the mentality of many Olympic athletes.
I had the fun of ripping through Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim last week, and I loved a portion where the author interviewed Olympic swimmer Katie Ledecky’s coach, Bruce Gemmell. He commented on her approach before a race, “When asked if she was nervous, she said she never let herself picture anything else but winning.” That’s it.
(In fact, Ledecky really held today’s two statements in a similar tension to what I’m encouraging in this essay, because her coach also noted that in practice she failed repeatedly and wasn’t afraid of it: “She was always willing to stick her neck out in training, and she failed more than anyone else I’ve ever coached, but that’s only because we set the bar so high.” That’s the athlete’s version of “It’s okay if I don’t understand all of this as long as I attempt it.”)
Long before I read Why We Swim or Educated, I had a conversation with a college friend of mine. He was widely regarded as a genius. He and I weren’t in the same majors, so we didn’t have much interaction in the classroom. But one day we were conversing about a fellow college classmate, one who was in one of his majors. And he commented that he wasn’t any smarter than this particular classmate, but that the main difference was mental. Without any announced pretensions (I think I’m the only person he ever told this to), when my regarded-as-a-genius friend was in class and strange equations were being placed on the board by the professor, and concepts that seemed untethered from reality were suggested as fundamental to his academic understanding, my friend simply assumed that this strange material would make sense. While everyone else in his class freaked out, including this other classmate that he regarded as equally bright, my friend just told himself that he’d eventually understand the material. And he did.
Now, this carries more than a slight whiff of the positive-thinking pseudo-intellectual garbage you can find on LinkedIn and in many pop science books. But I’m not sharing this story or any of the above as a universal case: not everything you try to understand will you be able to understand. And yet, without the mindset of “I can and should understand this; I just need to keep grinding away at it,” much reading and learning will be impeded unnecessarily.
Just like Katie Ledecky or Tara Westover, we ought to approach our reads with the mentality of “I’ve got this.” Until we do.
Now I should make a careful note. I’m not encouraging re-reading ten times until you “get it.” I’m not encouraging overreading, which is what that is. And I realize I haven’t written about overreading yet. (Apologies, but it’s a hard topic to write about, at least cleanly. I am working on that piece.) Telling yourself “I’ve got this” doesn’t mean punishing yourself with re-reads, scanning the pages until you want to cry. Some re-reading can be helpful, sure, but most of it is performative, not functional.
So when you’re approaching the read thinking “I’ve got this,” get after the read, absolutely. Wrestle with the words, try to force your brain into giving them shape. But unless you’re stranded on an island, literal or family-imposed as for Westover, “I can and should understand this; I just need to keep grinding away at it,” is not intended as advice for never-ending grinding on a single work.
It might be that you need to stretch your boundaries a bit more before your labors on this specifically challenging work are rewarded.
This, though, is why we have two statements to keep in mind for our reads. It’s okay if we “don’t get everything.” Not even world-class intellectuals do, not every time and not regularly. The best of them get much more than the rest of us mortals, to be sure, but that’s a different matter. We aren’t typically reading to compete. We read mostly for ourselves.
And to read well for ourselves, especially when reading material we expect to be challenging, those two incongruous statements are the framework for a flourishing reading experience:
It’s okay if I don’t understand all of this as long as I attempt it.
I can and should understand this; I just need to keep grinding away at it.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh
P.S. I keep telling myself that it’s okay if I didn’t get something I’ve read because I will never forget attempting Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in high school. I got WRECKED. Many years later, I read his A Theory of Moral Sentiments after having done some ethics research, and that book made a lot more sense. I think, nevertheless, that I benefited from my adolescent attempt on The Wealth of Nations, even though my eyes read pages upon pages without my brain comprehending a thing. I wasn’t, as it were, precocious. (Something I already knew by that point. I was merely curious about the book that kept getting referenced by all of these people.)
That was my worst book report in high school. I think my teacher took pity on me when he was grading it, though I don’t think he knew just how much pity he should have taken. That book is a tank. And yet aside from the severe and beneficial lesson in humility, I benefited most from trying to grind it out, telling myself the whole time that this was a book that could be comprehended. I was absolutely wrong about my ability at that moment—and I readily admitted it then—but I wasn’t wrong to take on the book when I did. I'm still reading, right?