Reading that Isn’t Reading

For reasons I won’t go into here, I was recently looking for occurrences of the phrase as all the world knows in the writings of P. G. Wodehouse. It sounds like something Bertie Wooster would say, so I began rereading The Code of the Woosters, my favorite Wodehouse novel. Bingo!—which also happens to be the name of one of Bertie’s hapless chums—five pages in, Bertie informs us that “as all the world knows,” his Aunt Dahlia is “the courteous and popular proprietress of a weekly sheet for the delicately nurtured entitled Milady’s Boudoir.” Instincts confirmed, I moved on from The Code of the Woosters to the classic early Jeeves stories, confident I would find at least another half-dozen instances of as all the world knows. I didn’t find any.

At this point an obvious question arises. Why didn’t I use Google or some other digital means of ransacking Wodehouse’s works? A few keystrokes would have swiftly and accurately completed a search that my skimming performed with plodding imprecision. Well, I had the books at hand. I felt reasonably sure of my memory. And I didn’t think the search would take very long. To tell the truth, though, the real reason I didn’t reach for some digital device is that the idea didn’t cross my mind until later. That’s just the sort of person I am.

When it began to look as though Wodehouse’s fiction, contrary to my recollection, wasn’t littered with instances of as all the world knows, I remembered that my wife, the English professor, was looking for twentieth-century borrowings of the phrase perfect gentle knight from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Now that I had noticed in at least two Jeeves stories. I would just take a minute and jot those page numbers down. As soon as I could find them again. They were in here somewhere. Probably in this next story—or the one after that.

Everyone has experienced the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon when trying to remember a name or word. My Wodehouseian wanderings point to a visual counterpart—a sort of tip-of-the-eyeball phenomenon involving the stubborn nonappearance of printed words where one knows they ought to be. It can quickly become an insidious condition. After further hurried searching I felt not only frustrated but queasy, as though I’d inhaled a plate of rich delectable food. On top of an overstuffed bloated feeling, I discovered I hadn’t tasted anything. Wodehouse’s balanced, finely textured sentences might as well have been a bland and uniform mush.

The more I thought about it, the more the whole thing seemed troubling and wrong. Racing through a book in search of a particular phrase was diametrically opposed to what reading ought to be. In fact it wasn’t reading at all. “Well of course it wasn’t reading,” you’d have every right to say. It was self-imposed rummaging made obsolete by computers. No one reads that way, or thinks of what I was doing as reading. All right, then, let’s call my outmoded activity an illustration—a laboratory test case revealing a form of inattention that happens all the time, and now more than ever.

Reading that isn’t reading has been around for at least a century or two. Who actually reads a newspaper? It’s more nearly as if we mine it, extracting information and amusement as they happen to catch our eye. That’s what headlines, captions, and subtitles are for—to guide our selective scanning. We don’t read a newspaper, we look at it. More recently this mode of looking has expanded into our other dealings with words, thanks to the Internet and the tools with which we search its contents. Rarely do we read an article, blog entry, or post without some search or link having instantly taken us there, assuring us the piece is worth our time. Even then we read restlessly, provisionally, ready to bail out when we become bored, irritated, or tired. Other words await us...