Reading is a contact sport
"We are being battered by ideas, and we are changing."
Every so often, you read a line and see the world anew. This is a strange sort of change—so quiet yet so sure. Nobody expresses the sensation quite like Annie Dillard: “I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.”
In the following brief meditation on beginning his tenure as Reader in Residence, Jeff Icenhower has embraced the event horizon. May we all be so gentle and resolved. — Joe
When I learned there was a Resident Reader, my world shifted. I wondered how reading could be a creative act? I equated creativity with a creator-observer model. There are Resident Musicians, and Artists, and Writers. These are, to my mind, typically creative. That is, one or more people create, and others observe. Music is listened to, art seen, written works read. Whatever is created is projected with the intent to change those who hear/see/read the creation. But a Resident Reader? How can the act of reading be creative? Who is the creator? Who is the audience? What is the creative process, and where is the change?
Considering reading as a creative act, I believe the creator and the consumer are the same person. Reading then becomes an invisible art form, with its only impact on the reader. There is creativity in the selection and change from the content, but nothing to observe or to hear. Certainly a reader may be seen laughing, or crying, or making notes—but these are secondary signs of the changes reading causes. Any change occurs first within the reader. For reading changes the reader, as surely as any physical blow.
The world, then, might be impacted by changes in how the reader connects to the world around them. Understanding this, the act of selecting reading material suddenly takes on greater meaning. I have to ask myself, why do I choose what I choose to read? No longer can my selection of what I will read be an innocent act. More than ever I know that what I read will change me, and touch the world around me.
This is the beginning of my time as Resident Reader. If you see me, or any other reader, now you know you are witnessing a struggle. We are being battered by ideas, and we are changing. —Jeff Icenhower
This is a beautiful counterpoint to the platitude that art is not art unless shared with others. The reader may create internally but the effects on the reader, and therefore others, are real. I think the same reasoning can extend to all creative acts, solitary or not.