Several years ago, I was sitting with one of the kindergarten students at my school. He had drawn a picture of a four-legged stick-creature, which, he informed me, was a water dragon. The water dragon was magical of course and could do any number of remarkable things to protect him from the dangers of lava, which flowed in illustratively threatening swirls around the creature. The water dragon could cool the lava with sprays of water; the water dragon could make shields; the water dragon could turn into a lava-proof submarine. He then added with a whispering lilt in his voice as if letting me in on something mystical: "He can even turn into a book!"
This child reminded me that books are secret and powerful. It is in this vein that I would like to think about this question of why close reading might be important: to reflect on the phrase less with regard to its associations with attentiveness or sharp analysis and more with an eye toward connotations of close meaning intimate as in the phrase close friends. I would like to look at close reading as a highly personal act; it is not a skill. As a teacher my hope is to provide young students the space to engage with reading and understanding not as something to be received but as something to be added to. An education that is steeped only in ‘getting’ ideas is an impoverished one.
In a bit of marginalia from her teenage notebooks, Susan Sontag scrawled when reading André Gide’s journals:
“I finished reading this at 2:30 a.m. of the same day I acquired it—I should have read it much more slowly and I must re-read it many times—Gide and I have attained such perfect intellectual communion that I experience appropriate labor pains for every thought he gives to! Thus I do not think: ‘How marvelously lucid this is!’— but: ‘Stop! I cannot think this fast! Or rather I cannot grow this fast!’ For, I am not only reading this book, but creating it myself, and this unique and enormous experience has purged my mind of much of the confusion and sterility that has clogged it all these horrible months.” (Sontag, Susan Notebooks. 1948)
A first reading is always rushed, intuitive, and incomplete; there is no other kind. The power of a book, or any written text, comes from its capacity to be re-read. We can draw ourselves closer to a text because we have the capacity to visit it again and again. The words themselves do not change but our communion with the text does.
Jacqueline Hamesse notes that in the monastic tradition of reading that dominated the early medieval period in Europe, monks read silently and aloud as a vital part of demonstrating their dedication to and communion with the divine. “Reading aloud encouraged reading at a very slow pace, and it aided assimilation of the content of the works: the three exercises assigned to monks were reading (legere), meditation (meditari), and contemplation (contemplari).” (Hamesse, Jacqueline “The Scholastic Model of Reading.”)
Reading is what allowed monks to ruminate and reflect.
In a statement Philip Larkin wrote on his views of poetry that he wrote for an anthology by D.J. Enright, he stated:
I write poems to preserve things I have seen/thought/felt (if I may so indicate a composite and complex experience) both for myself and for others, though I feel that my prime responsibility is to the experience itself, which I am trying to keep from oblivion for its own sake. Why I should do this, I have no idea, but I think the impulse to preserve lies at the bottom of all art. (Larkin, Philip “Statement.” Poets of the 1950s, edited by D.J. Enright, Kenkyusha, 1955.)
Reading then can also afford us the opportunity to create for ourselves (in the sense a young Sontag alludes to above) what a writer has tried to preserve. These ideas are what lie as a sub-stratum to my pedagogical approach to close reading with children. Because I am not talking about a skill or set of skills but instead something that is ongoing and iterative by nature, I hope to share fragmentary glimpses into examples of how such an approach might look at given moments in time. My hope is to describe what close reading has been in my classroom rather than prescribe what it must be in yours.
I’m excited to explore with others how young children possess these creative and receptive impulses as readers. I believe that by treating reading as a personal act rather than a skill to be graded, we can help restore joy and love to reading for more children. Whether you are a teacher or a parent or a writer, subscribe here if you are curious to delve into this topic more fully in the coming months.
Excited for the adventures of our future readers.