How to Keep Awake While Reading?

How to
Keep Awake While Reading

by Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.

Source

The rules for reading yourself to sleep are much
easier to follow than are the rules for keeping
awake while reading. Just get into bed in a
comfortable position, see that the light is
inadequate enough to cause a slight eyestrain,
choose something you don't care whether or not you
read, and unless you have insomnia, you will be
nodding soon enough. Those who are expert in
relaxing with a book don't have to wait for
nightfall or for bed. A comfortable chair in the
library will do at anytime.

Unfortunately, the rules for keeping awake do
not consist in doing just the opposite. It is
possible to keep awake while reading in a
comfortable chair or even in bed, and people have
been known to strain their eyes by reading late, in
light too dim. What kept the famous readers by
candlelight awake? One thing certainly -- that it
made a difference to them, a great difference,
whether or not they read the book they had in
hand.

Whether you read actively or passively, whether
you try to keep awake or not depends in large part
on your purpose in reading. There are many kinds of
reading and many sorts of things to read. You may
be seeking the same effortless pleasures of
relaxation that the movies and radio so readily
afford, or you may be making the effort to profit
by your reading. Let me roughly divide books into
those which compete with the movies and those with
which the movies cannot compete. They are the books
that can elevate or instruct. If they are fine
works of fiction, they can deepen your appreciation
of human life. If they are serious works of
nonfiction, they can inform or enlighten you.

Everyone admits that if your aim in reading is
to profit -- to grow somehow in mind or spirit --
you have to keep awake. That means reading as
actively as possible. That means making an effort
-- for which you expect to be repaid.

Everyone admits that good books, fiction or
nonfiction, deserve such reading. To use a good
book as a sedative is conspicuous waste. To all
asleep or, what is the same, to let your mind
wander during the hours you planned to devote to
reading for profit is clearly to defeat your own
ends.

The sad fact is that many people who can
distinguish between pleasure and profit (and who
know which books give which) nevertheless fail to
carry out their reading plans. The reason is that
they do not know how to read actively, how to keep
their mind on what they are reading by making it do
the work without which no profit can be earned.

I have one simple rule for keeping awake while
reading. It underlies every other rule for
successful reading. You must ask questions while
you read -- questions which you yourself must try
to answer in the course of reading. Asking and
answering questions is what pays the dividends in
reading.

Any questions? No. The art of reading consists
in the habit of asking the right questions in the
right order. Let me illustrate this by giving you
the four main questions you must ask about any book
or, to make it more concrete, about any nonfiction
book.

• What is the book as a whole about?
  Here you must try to discover the leading theme
  of the books. And how the author develops this
  theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into
  its essential subordinate topics.


• What in detail is being said, and
  how? Here you must try to underline for
  yourself -- with a pencil, perhaps, or mentally
  if the book is borrowed -- the main ideas,
  assertions, and arguments that constitute the
  author's message.


• Is it true, in whole or part? You
  cannot answer this question until you have
  answered the first two. You have to know what is
  being said -- and to do that you must know how
  it is being said, for you must be able to
  penetrate through the author's language of his
  mind -- before you can sit in judgment and
  decide whether you agree or disagree. When you
  do understand a point, however, you are
  obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make
  up your own mind. Knowing the author's is not
  enough.


• What of it? If the book has given you
  information, and especially if it is true, you
  must certainly ask about its significance. Why
  does the author think it is important to know
  these facts? If the book has not only informed
  you, but also enlightened you, it is still
  necessary to seek further enlightenment by
  asking what follows next, what is further
  implied or suggested.

These four questions summarize all the
obligations of a reader. They apply to anything
worth reading -- a book or an article or even an
advertisement for something you may be interested
in buying. Knowing these questions is, of course,
not enough. You must remember to ask them as you
read. The habit of doing that is the first mark of
an active reader. But more than that, you must be
able to answer them precisely and accurately. The
trained ability to do just that is the art of
reading.

This ability most of our college graduates lack
today, for the art of reading is no longer taught
in our "over-progressive" schools. But, college
graduate or not, you can learn to read for profit,
and profitably, if you will only try. It is
necessary, of course, to know more than these four
questions, because skill in answering them can be
acquired only through following all the rules of
the art of reading.

To answer the first question, for instance, you
must follow the rules for reading a book
analytically. A book is a complex structure, a
whole having many parts, which you must know how to
take apart. To answer the second question you must
follow the rules for reading a book
interpretatively. To reach the author's mind, you
must know how to see through his language, and this
means weighing his words, turning over his
sentences, and tying up his paragraphs. And to
answer the first two questions, you must follow the
rules of critical reading, which tell
you how to make a fair and dispassionate judgment
of the true and the false before you decide to
agree or disagree with the book's message.

To expound and explain all these rules in a
helpful way cannot be done here. What I have said,
however, makes the two main points. Unless you want
to keep awake while reading, there is no need to
develop skill or art in reading. But if you do want
to, you must do more than keep your eyes open and
your mind off your work, finances, basketball,
cooking and the children. You must keep your mind
on the book -- as actively as possible. To learn to
do that, you must keep asking questions and keep
trying to answer them.

One word more. People go to sleep over good
books not because they are unwilling to make the
effort, but because they don't know how to make it.
Good books are over your head. They wouldn't be
good for you if they weren't. And books that are
over your head weary you unless you reach up to
them and pull yourself up to their level. It isn't
stretching that tires you, but stretching
unsuccessfully because you lack the skill. To keep
on reading actively, you must have not only the
will to do so, but the skill -- the art that
enables you to elevate yourself by mastering what
at first right seems to be over your head.

The more you keep awake while reading, by
sustaining the activity of asking and answering
questions, the more exciting you will find the
process. Don't be afraid that it will become too
exciting.

Intellectual insomnia is still quite a long way
off.

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