Rigor
On the effects of reading
To read widely, or to read books from many different centuries and locations, and to read deeply, or to read closely and follow details that lead to other texts, is to read rigorously.
To read with rigor is to repeatedly experience this sequence of feelings:
You feel awe and surprise. The text feels new, like a miracle attributable only to the ahistorical genius of its author. You want an explanation of the magic, so you decide to read texts that informed it.
While reading associated texts, you find pieces of precedent. You marvel at the fact that these ideas were articulated even earlier, at an even greater remove from you, but this feeling isn’t as strong as the original shock of the new.
The magic of novelty becomes the magic of materiality, genealogy. The original text first felt alien in an essential sense, somehow oblique to the history from which it emerged, but now it seems like an iteration on good work from quieter predecessors. You feel the facts of influence, context, tradition reestablish themselves in your mind; you feel lineage leak back in to your vision of things. Hungry again, you read until you find the next miracle.
A brief example: I’ve been studying early Jewish literature. I hadn’t yet read the Book of Isaiah, and was surprised by its stark inversions, apocalyptic language, and universal call for peace. Throughout the Talmud, rabbis make clear the importance of communal love and kindness, even when such acts seem contrary to Mosaic law. One passage of the Mishnah is maximally explicit with a categorical humanism in which every person is said to be a unique being for whom the world was created. And historical studies of the period in which early Christianity fomented show the steady practice of poor, rural Jews proclaiming apocalypse and divine primacy. All this served to contextualize the Gospels, showing that Jesus was not some embodied irruption of a new moral order, but was instead a man for whom certain aspects of Jewish culture stood paramount—including a post-Tanakh conviction in life after death—and thus demanded a strict yet simple sincerity. The Gospels are novel in some ways, of course, and are often unquestionably beautiful, but they are not fundamentally new—a fact easily missed if you were to read them after those variations on blunt expediency called Roman culture. Thus reading rigorously rematerializes much of what feels otherworldly about the New Testament.
To read rigorously is to marvel at the solidity of bridges. To read rigorously is to see magic in the wild functionality of a child. It is a process by which a curious person replaces Quixotic enchantment—one in which the demand of reason is darted numb—with a more permanent love. But this is not a complacent or comfortable process; reading with rigor creates an admiration ginned up in the chase, a commitment carried in the hunger to see around the next corner. And we will never lack new shadows whose light we must see.