A Second Look

After a swift start to the year towards my reading goals, I’ve slowed a bit in February. Turns out, planning a move abroad takes a lot of time! I’m trying to be generous with myself, as the move is of course our highest priority right now. I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep up my reading, my writing, as well as I did in January. But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up. Incidentally, what I might’ve lost in breadth I’ve made up for in depth, as I started a seminar this month to work through a selection of texts in a group.

I’d become fascinated by the idea of a great books course only within the last few years, after hearing about St. John’s College and their unique curriculum. There, classes are organized into seminars, where the focus is on reading in a group, discussing great works, and trying to gleam what they have to teach us through dialogue, inquiry, and intention. In my own way, I’ve been trying to do this for a long time, to varied results. I started writing book reviews as a means to hone my critical reading, thinking, and writing abilities, which I think has been mostly successful. I’ve always been a pretty good reader, but through a new form of inquiry (writing book criticism), I felt I reached another stage. Yet I still felt something was missing.

Recently, a friend told me about the Catherine Project, an online seminar similar to St. John’s method. Each week, we read a selection, write a question the text inspired in us, and then get together for two hours to discuss what we thought. I’m only a couple of weeks in, but I’ve been loving the experience so far. The seminar has been extremely helpful in deepening my reading in two ways: one, in reading towards questions, towards inquiry; and two, through the discussions raised in our meetings.

Simply reframing my reading from something in search of answers to something in search of questions has already made a huge difference in how I approach a text. Paradoxically, it seems like this has lead to more insight from my reading overall. When you read towards a question, you’re looking deeper than when you consider a text as a means for answers. You’re analyzing not only what is being stated, but why that might be, and what that inspires in you. Often, texts are a process of thinking, a mode of inquiry themselves. Do I have the same questions as the text? Or do I consider this from a different perspective? Rather than assuming there’s a concrete answer, reading towards a question forces you to dig in deeper.

The other aspect of this process that’s been so fruitful to me has been the seminars themselves. This might seem obvious, but it’s really amazing to hear the thoughts and perspectives of others in regard to a singular work, especially when those others are also approaching the text towards inquiry and insight. I’ve always loved going to see a movie with someone, and talking about it afterwards, but this is like a step further. Recently, in my group Japanese lessons, the teacher suggested one of the best ways for my classmates and I to improve is to ask more questions of each other. I think it’s easy to try and move a conversation forward, or gloss over something when you don’t understand. Maybe you’re embarrassed to not grasp a point, or just not listening close enough. But once you get past that, and ask questions, the conversation compounds further. It might push the person you’re speaking with to consider their point more closely, or reframe their thinking. And often, when you have a question on something, you’re not alone.

When you read towards a question, you’re looking deeper than when you consider a text as a means for answers.

Recently, we read through Sophocles' Oedipus the Tyrant. It’s a work I’ve read a couple of times, through school at different levels. I was a bit over it. A bit closed off. I felt I had already read it, and knew what it was trying to say, that I got the “gist” of Oedipus. But of course, I was wrong. Through the discussion, we touched on questions that never occurred to me about the work, deep inquiries into the nature of free will, of memory, of being. All this from a play I’ve read before, more than once. It’s also just pushed me to read closer on my own, too. For this week, I’ve been reading through Plato’s Meno, one of the Socratic dialogues. Of course, this is a dense, tough work. Often I would read a page, and not entirely grasp the argument Socrates was walking through. But even on my first read, if I just went back to the top of the page, and read it through once more, I found there was so much more waiting for me. I just needed to take a second look.