Reading What You Don’t Know
Dear Reader,
Before I get to today’s requested piece, I want to make a quick note. I’ll be downshifting to one piece a month, starting this month. There are a number of reasons behind this decision—while some readers would like me to return to posting five days a week, others are woefully “behind” and would like me to slow up; I’m not a content creator, and I have no interest in becoming one; the pandemic’s effects may or may not be lifting, but people have options aplenty for entertainment and edification; I despise writing; I have other writing to do; there’s reading to be done; and so on. Complaints about the decline in monthly offerings may be directed to my publisher, John Smith of Remote, OR.
Today’s piece might just as easily have been titled “Reading What You Can’t Understand.” In a certain sense, I’ve already covered this territory in “Congruous Incongruities.” But as it was requested, I’ll write a little today about the experience of tackling material you haven’t a chance of comprehending.
There are at least two entrances to a work you won’t understand: those that you already know you’ve got no chance with and those that you’re really not certain what’s before you but you’re willing to give it a shot.
Two works from a decade ago stand out to me especially in this regard: Bertrand Russell’s The Philosophy of Mathematics and John Maynard Keynes’ A Treatise on Probability. (Yes, there’s a math theme, but that’s not, in fact, why the two texts were selected.)
When I picked up Bertrand Russell’s book, it was the first book of his that I attempted to read. Even so, I knew I was unlikely to handle it very well. I was curious, and so I purchased it and had at. Russell was a big name in philosophy and I was teaching junior high math. Why not? I’d probably get schooled and whatnot, but it was worth the shot to see what was there.
I’m still not sure what was there. It’s been over a decade, and that book stares at me from the shelf, mocking my pathetic comprehension. While reading it, I saw words I recognized and formulae I recognized and found something I didn’t recognize: the inability to connect those recognized things with anything I could call comprehension. The experience isn’t an emotional rollercoaster because you never really reach the highs.
You honestly feel like you’re reading in a haze. Or, for those of you who’ll understand this reference, like there’s a governor on your reading comprehension.
A question that remains about that book is whether I shall ever return to it.
A work I will return to is John Maynard Keynes’ A Treatise on Probability. You see, this book isn’t philosophy, but it is the background from which Keynes made his influential explorations of economics. At the time of my reading it, I’d made some light incursions into probability. Indeed, I thought they were enough that I might be able to handle this book. It was worth the attempt.
And that it was. I was not, however, able to handle the book. Aside from not learning enough about Keynes to then pursue a real grappling with his economic theories, which was my goal, I found that there was something just at the edge of my periphery in his probability arguments and demonstrations. How much of that was historical distance and how much of that was the difficulty of genre—it’s hard to say, but I’d put more of my money on the latter. I’d read enough probability to see where he was going much of the time, but not enough to make any intelligent engagement with it. “You’re doing a thing, and now you’re doing this other thing.” Great. Why again? And my brain had no answer.
Still, my plan with Keynes’ text is to return. I’ve done more probability reading since then, and I’ve a shelf’s worth of probability texts that await my unhurried investigation. I wasn’t ready for his book then, but provided time and reflection, I believe I can improve on my first efforts. I might even do so if I attempted it tomorrow without my planned warmups. (But I don’t plan to test this hypothesis.)
Once you’re done with reading what you don’t know, you’ll often find yourself quite unhappy. It isn’t pleasant to experience. Inexperienced or arrogant readers have one of three responses: “This is all crap anyway” or “I totally understood this” or “Because I couldn’t understand this, it must be profound.” I’m never sure which of those is worse or more annoying. But none of them are the appropriate response in regular practice. Of course, they probably seem more profound than my own preferred response, which is a simple “UGH”.
Reading what you don’t know, or can’t understand, is a taxing experience, often even a depressing one. And our culture’s demands for FULL COMPREHENSION add to that harshness. We don’t allow for intellectual tinkering in our reading—mistakes can only be made in startups or makerspaces, apparently. And that is pure poppycock. And it is culturally harmful.
Sure, I don’t like the frustration of not understanding what I’m reading. (I mean, I really don’t like it. Guiding others towards better comprehension is an intimate part of my job. So when I don’t understand something, it seems like I’m kind of bad at my job, right?) While I don’t like that frustration, I’ll never improve as a reader without it. I’ll never improve as a reasoner without it. I’ll also never improve as a teacher of reading if I can’t recall how it feels to struggle with incomprehension. I’ll write about this experience another day, but one of the reasons I’m auditing a course on the Gothic language right now is to remind myself what it feels like to encounter the strangeness of a new language, something many English language learners encounter.
You can’t live in the realm of incomprehension—that’s another pathway into the grinding read, a hell I wish on no one. Yet persisting in the realm of incomprehension—and by this I mean outright incomprehension, not simply material that flickers on the nearest margins of our comprehension—allows our development as readers, and not merely because of the intellectual humility it should inspire.
As a reminder, we don’t always anticipate our incomprehension. If we live in fear of that incomprehension, however, or denigrate the experience of reading without comprehension, we won’t adventure very far in our reading.
I also have a theory, one that has slight support from the social sciences but not definitive support (and some educators in overzealous application of various pedagogical theories would tell me this is harmful), that getting absolutely blasted by a read is the best thing you can do for your brain. This is primarily because reading comprehension isn’t a one-time, fill-in-the-bubble thing. Certain reads keep working in your brain, long after you’ve finished reading them. Other reads, ones you “perfectly comprehended,” fly out of your mind the moment you finish them and their attendant quiz, and you could re-read practically the whole article or book before recognizing that you’d read it before.
Don’t get me wrong. “I think my brain is broken” is an experience usually best left to finals week in college. Yet... that says more about the value of its infrequency, not its appropriate place. There’s something about that niggling incomprehension—the annoyance, the surprise, the brokenness—something in that experience of mental haze in which your reading can never soar that seems essential for a full reading life.
(A meta note for readers of Stephen Booth, I’m not specifically writing about his exploration of incomprehension and the magic that it brings. There are some intersections with it, but his merry appreciation for incomprehension runs as a deeper complement to what I’m articulating here.)
So, did any bad memories flicker to mind? I didn’t list any literature above, nor did I highlight poetry specifically, which I very well might have done. (I didn't partly because that would have placed me nearer to Booth’s domain, but also for other reasons.)
More important than the memories, however, did I capture anything of your experience with reading something that you couldn’t comprehend? Did I leave some part of the effect unaddressed? These aren’t stories people share too often—simply that it happened, not the overall experience of that happening.
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh
P.S. There’s been a recent brouhaha over Substack. Although I don’t use Substack for this newsletter (I intentionally chose the artisan newsletter developer instead of the publicly traded or venture capital supported options, for reasons I won’t get into here), I obviously do write a newsletter and thus wondered how much the brouhaha pertained to me.
I might comment on that a bit more down the road, but for now, I want to pair two pieces that I think provide interesting reflection on Substack. The first offers a fairly common angle, but it’s a pleasantly readable version. The second is from the very writer who inspired Substack itself (which he doesn’t use), one of today’s most prominent writers in the tech world. I am ambivalent myself on what to make of this discussion. And it’s because these two reflections do a good job outlining certain aspects that should be considered together. Perhaps I’ll do a full argument diagram and investigate more tightly. In the meantime, I offer the pairing for your own consideration. These pieces are not connected to today’s theme; that is, they aren't headache-inducing reads.
P.P.S. On the subject of chocolate and reading pairings, which I once wrote about in remote fashion many months ago, may I suggest getting a bar or three of Raaka’s “Vanilla Violet” to enjoy alongside Jean Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain? It made for a more than fortuitous pairing as I re-read that book these past few days. (No, I won’t spoil why.) But seriously, if there are young ones in your life who’d either listen to this book or be likely candidates to attempt it, just get them a few bars of that chocolate—perhaps only one if they are cavity junkies—and let them delight in the joy of a master chocolatier paired with a master adventure writer.