A Reader on Reading

The room in which Carpaccio placed Augustine is a contemporary Venetian study, as worthy of the author of the Confessions as of the spirit of Jerome, responsible for the Latin version of the Bible and patron saint of translators: thin volumes facing forward on a high shelf, delicate bric-a-brac lined beneath it, a brass-studded leather chair and a small writing desk lifted from the flood-prone floor, a distant table with a rotating lectern beyond the door at the far left, and the saint’s working space, cluttered with open books and with those private objects which the years wash onto every writer’s desk—a seashell, a bell, a silver box. Set in the central alcove, a statue of the risen Christ looks towards a statuette of Venus standing among Augustine’s things; both inhabit, admittedly on different planes, the same human world: the flesh from whose delights Augustine prayed for release (“but not just now”) and the Logos, God’s Word that was in the beginning and whose echo Augustine heard one afternoon in a garden. At an obedient distance, a small white shaggy dog is expectantly watching.

This place depicts both the past and the present of a reader. Anachronism meant nothing to Carpaccio, since the compunction for historical faithfulness is a modern invention, not later perhaps than the nineteenth century and John Ruskin’s Pre-Raphaelite credo of “absolute, uncompromising truth … down to the most minute detail.” Augustine’s study and Augustine’s books, whatever these might have been in the fourth century, were, to Carpaccio and his contemporaries, in all essentials much like theirs. Scrolls or codices, bound leaves of parchment, or the exquisite pocket books that Aldus Manutius had printed just a few years before Carpaccio began his work at the guild were variant forms of the book—the book that changed and would continue to change, and yet remained one and the same. In the sense in which Carpaccio saw it, Augustine’s study is also like my own, a common reader’s realm: the rows of books and memorabilia, the busy desk, the interrupted work, the reader waiting for a voice — his own? the author’s? a spirit’s?—to answer questions seeded by the open page in front of him.

Since the fellowship of readers is a generous one, or so we are told, allow me to place myself for a moment next to Carpaccio’s august reader, he at his desk, I at mine. Has our reading—Augustine’s and Carpaccio’s and mine— altered in the passing centuries? And if so, how has it altered?

When I read a text on a page or a screen, I read silently. Through an unbelievably complex process or series of processes, clusters of neurons in specific sections of my brain decipher the text my eyes take in and make it comprehensible to me, without the need to mouth the words for the benefit of my ears. This silent reading is not as ancient a craft as we might think.

For Saint Augustine, my silent activity would have been, if not incomprehensible, at the very least surprising. In a famous passage of the Confessions, Augustine describes his curious coming upon Saint Ambrose in his cell in Milan, reading silently. “When he read,” Augustine recalled, “his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still.” Augustine, in the fourth century, usually read as the ancient Greeks and Romans had read, out loud, to make sense of the attached strings of letters without full stops or capitals. It was possible for an experienced and hurried reader to disentangle a text without speaking the words—Augustine himself was able to do this, as he tells us in his description of the tremendous moment of his conversion, when he picks up a volume of Paul’s Epistles and reads “in silence” the oracular line that tells him to “put on Christ like an armor.” But reading out loud was not only considered normal, it was also considered necessary for the full comprehension of a text. Augustine believed that reading needed to be made present; that within the confines of a page the scripta, the written words, had to become verba, spoken words, in order to spring into being. For Augustine, the reader had literally to breathe life into a text, to fill the created space with living language.

By the ninth century, punctuation and the greater diffusion of books had established silent reading as common, and a new element — privacy—had become a feature of the craft. For these new readers, silent reading allowed a sort of amorous intimacy with the text, creating invisible walls around them and the activity of reading. Seven centuries later, Carpaccio would have considered silent reading part and parcel of the scholar’s work, and his scholarly Augustine would necessarily be pictured in a private and quiet place.