As part of one of my graduate courses, I am reading the Probst book, Response and Analysis: Teaching Literature in Secondary School. I recently encountered one of the most beautiful definitions of reading that I have ever read (written by Alberto Manguel)...
The readers of books, into who family I was unknowingly entering (we always think that we are alone in each discovery, and that every experience, from death to birth is terrifyingly unique), extend or concentrate a function common to us all. Reading letters on a page is only one of its many guises. The astronomer reading a map of stars that no longer exists; the Japanese architect reading the land on which a house is to be built so as to guard it from evil forces; the zoologist reading the spoor of animals in the forest; the card-player reading her partner's gestures before playing the winning card; the dancer reading the choreographer's notations, and the public reading the dancer's movements on the stage; the weaver reading the intricate design of a carpet being woven; the organ-player reading various simultaneous strands of music orchestrated on the page; the parent reading the baby's face for signs of joy or fright, or wonder; the Chinese fortune-teller reading the ancient marks on the shell of a tortoise; the psychiatrist helping patients read their own bewhildering dreams; the Hawaiian fisherman reading the ocean currents by plunging a hand into the water; the farmer reading the weather in the sky--all these share with book-readers the craft of deciphering and translating signs. Some of these readings are couloured by the knowledge that the thing read was created for this specific purpose by other human beings--music notation or road signs, for instance--or by the gods--the tortoise shell, the sky at night. Others belong to chance.
And yet in every case, it is the reader who reads the sense; it is the reader who grants or recognizes in an object, place, or event a certain possible readability; it is the reader who must attribute meanign to a system of signs, and then decipher it. We all read ourselves and the world around us in order to glimpse what and where we are. We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but read. Reading, almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
What would you add to this definition? What is reading to you?
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