Going Deep

Here we are again. Standing at a threshold with one foot in the old year and another set tentatively into the new. I’m writing this during what has turned into an interminably long journey to visit my Australian family in Melbourne for Christmas, so this perch in seat 64E, somewhere high above the Pacific, seems a reasonable place for considering transitions from one state to another. On one level the trip so far has been a bit of a disaster. All efforts to arrange things so that our kids, each of whom needed to depart on a different day from a different East Coast city, could meet us in Los Angeles for the main flight, collapsed in a comedy of flight cancellations, weather delays, and missed connections. Consequently, a trip that should have put the four of us in Melbourne after a thirty-hour journey, currently stands at 72 hours and counting. So far only our son has made it to Australia, albeit without his suitcase. So, he’s spent most of his first couple of days in Melbourne shopping for underwear. As for our daughter, whose scheduled departure from the northeast coincided with the arrival of a New England storm, any prediction regarding when she might finally arrive in the bosom of her Australian family would be guesswork of the highest order.

But for all the temporal dislocation, one irreplaceable benefit of a fifteen-hour international flight remains: the uninterrupted opportunity it provides to fall into the pages of a really good book. Before leaving I picked up a copy of The Covenant of Water, Abraham Verghese’s magnificent epic that traces the joys, struggles, and hardships of one magic-touched family, set against the shimmering backdrop of colonial India as the sleeping giant awakens to throw off centuries of British rule. It’s a phenomenal novel whose beautifully-drawn characters live, love, and die in an early-twentieth century rural Kerala so vibrantly described that the reader can see, hear, taste, and not infrequently smell it. Still, at seven hundred pages, the book is quite a dead weight to commit to the carry-on bag, and as we scrambled to navigate the baggage allowance I came close to leaving it behind. Now, after three days spent in and out of airports and planes, how glad I am that I did not. Many times, I’ve surfaced from its teeming landscapes, battering monsoons, and impossibly intricate social dynamics, and been surprised to discover how many hours have slipped by in the real world. 

Finding the space for reading deeply has never been harder. And in our hyper-connected, always-on world, is there any better space than the suspended animation of a long transcontinental flight in which to lose yourself in the pages of a really good book? I’ve been thinking about the concept of deep reading since hearing an interview between the podcaster Ezra Klein and the literacy scholar Maryanne Wolf, who argues passionately for the irreplaceable power of reading deeply in her book Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. In the interview, Wolf describes the ways in which the cognitive process she terms “deep reading” “…nourishes our capacity for attention, empathy, and insight,” in ways that the surface-skimming of distracted, digital text consumption simply cannot reproduce. She explains the brain’s semi-miraculous ability to create novel circuits, and how the act of reading requires it to build networks between many other processes—vision, language, cognition—that simply would not evolve via any other activity. She argues that “deep reading,” the process of falling into a story to such an extent that the landscapes and characters it introduces also engage our own knowledge, memories, and experiences; activates our brains completely, in the process inviting us to build bridges between our own lived experiences and those of the characters on the page. In a certain sense, she argues, deep reading provides an opportunity to enter the mind of another person—to know what they know, to feel what they feel. Despite all the advantages that digital media offers, a good book remains the only portal through which we get to do that. 

This January 2024, “Analog” issue, with its discussion of heritage crops, sustainable gardening, and colored pencil illustration, represents our effort to consider the tactile benefits of the hands-on, the off-line, and the here-and-now. In that context, and this being the season for resolutions, perhaps 2024 is the right time for resolving to turn down the digital noise, creating space for discovering new worlds. Best of all, since doing this requires nothing more complicated than access to a good book, there’s no need to fly halfway around the world to do it. 

Note: Ezra Klein’s interview with Maryanne Wolf was published on Nov 22, 2022. Listen to it, and read a transcript here.