I recently heard George Saunders speak as part of the Portland Arts & Lectures series.
When I go see an author or artist or celebrity I admire, I grit my teeth hoping I’ll like them as much as the person I’ve built up in my mind. I needn’t have worried — that guy has nothing on the real George Saunders! 💘
Saunders shared his unlikely literary beginnings as an academic ne’er-do-well and workaday engineer. He shared his ambitions and foibles, and described his day-to-day practices as a writer and teacher.
Through it all, he elevated the acts of reading and writing without puffing himself up or downplaying his accomplishments. This is a man who has devoted himself to language as a way to connect across space, time and circumstance. He finds purpose and satisfaction and takes pride in a good day’s work, and feels immensely grateful he gets to do it.
Saunders concluded his talk by challenging us to “become better readers.” He urged us to commit to books we might not otherwise gravitate toward; to grapple with hard material and tolerate the discomfort of not getting (or liking) it right away. He reminded us that reading expands us only as much as we’re willing to let it open us to new things.
Of course, he was right.
Upon hearing this I squirmed in my seat, chastened. Like many, my attention has taken a hit during these tech-fueled years. But that’s not the only reason my reading stamina has withered; it began to slip long before I carried an iPhone, when I was an exhausted new mother. In the many, many years since, I haven’t worked hard enough to restore it.
I let myself become overwhelmed by the unremitting ooze of “content” gushing from every channel, supercharged now by AI. But beneath the disillusionment radiated grief, unrecognized, over the richness I had let slip away.
Words are units of connection. Language is how we turn our private thoughts into sharable things. When we distance ourselves from language, or worse, forget about it, we risk cutting ourselves off.
Pass words through the algorithmic and advertising machine enough and they’ll come out as raw, undifferentiated content, like ground meat. But pass words through one’s reading mind and they’ll interact and combine with memories and experiences, connecting them, reorienting them, fertilizing and seeding the ground with new insight.
One might try to dismiss Saunders’s concern over the erosion of reading as a distinguished professor’s lament or as fist-shaking at “these kids today.” But he wasn’t fetishizing language or extolling the classics; he didn’t even promise art would save us. He simply urged us to recommit to reading and strengthen our grip on language as a way back to ourselves and each other.
His call landed at just the right moment because my moment of regret passed and something in me woke up, fresh and electric. I heard the unmistakable answer: I’m going to become a better reader.
We’re drowning in spoken and written text. In this era of smartphones, podcasts, and the 24-7 news & advertising cycle, it’s gotten to where we must block word out to tend to our nervous systems and even discern our own thoughts.
But what if we reversed the frame?
What if we filled up on words that nourished and expanded us until there was no time or appetite for slop?
What would happen if we all become better readers?
