Rituals and Reading

And reading as ritual.

Painting by David Hettinger

A lattice for your life.

As you might have gathered from my last story, I’ve been trying to settle down a bit these last few weeks. Get my two feet on the ground, spend time at home, lean into winter, and surrender to routine. And it’s got me thinking a lot about rituals. In his book The Disappearance of Rituals, the philosopher Byong Chul Han defines them as

“symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. ”

What he means is that rituals stabilize life, and in a time when things feel a little up in the air from, stability is just what I’m after — a feeling I think might be going around the houses at the moment.

I recently read an interview between

Matt Klein

(of the

ZINE

newsletter) and Sarah Unger (of cultural insight company CULTIQUE) where they discuss emerging cultural trends. The first one to come up is what Sarah calls Aspirational Stability — a concept born in a post-COVID world riddled with chaos where there is “an emerging sanctity and comfort in elevating the ordinary.” The mundane is no longer boring, they tell us, but a way of coping with a world gone awry.

It explains so much! It explains why I’m so devoted to our Sundays of grocery shopping and making stock and cleaning the bathroom and taking a candlelit bath. It explains why I’ve spent the last two weeks setting my alarm early so that I can get up and do my morning pages before the day properly starts. And why I am religiously lighting a candle and turning off the big light when we sit down for dinner.

In the context of Han’s writing, he mainly refers to rituals of community, be they religious services, feasts and fasts, or even just the good manners that “make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful, gentle treatment of things.” (love that line!) But as someone who doesn’t really have a regular set of communal rituals — apart from camping or going to the pub — it has been these small moments that have brought me a real sense of calm these past couple of weeks. All small things, relative mundanities, repetitive acts of same-ness, as Han would put it, that have given me a framework for life. Things to hold onto. A lattice upon which the vine of the every day can grow and thrive.

Reading as ritual

I’ve also been doing a lot of reading, which is nothing particularly new, but it has been making me think about the act of reading as a ritual.

I had never listened to The Ezra Klein Podcast before, but the other day while I was making dinner I put on an episode called “This is your brain on deep reading. It’s pretty magnificent.” In it, Ezra speaks with a researcher called Maryanne Wolf whose work explores the science between the process of reading and the neuroscience of the brain.

What I took from what she said was that there are two types of reading — the kind you do as a child when you are learning to associate sounds with shapes and meanings, and the deeper reading that you do as your literacy advances and you read more complex texts. This second kind of reading makes all kinds of connections in our brains. It improves our capacity for language, reasoning, critical thinking, and empathy, and allows us to absorb and analyze unfamiliar information.

Living in the information age that we seem to find ourselves in, constantly bombarded with news and emails and texts and social media, the reading many of us are doing on our phones — skimming, scrolling, scanning — is closer to the simple reading we did when we were first learning the alphabet than it is to that nice, juicy second kind.

According to Byong Chul Han, the content on our smartphones which demands our constant attention makes lingering, a key tenet of a good ritual, impossible. It confronts us with constant newness and disappearance, destabilizing life and driving more consumption. It also saps away the “cultural technique of deep attention” that comes from ritual practices. I’ve said to friends before that reading is a fitness. You can’t just go from not reading at all to reading Crime and Punishment, and it only gets more difficult when the bells and whistles of Instagram are constantly jangling in front of your face.

So while my attention to the book in front of me generally has quite a long lifespan, hearing these pieces of wisdom has made me see reading, as well as all my other little rituals, as essential exercises in being with what is in front of me right now. Being Where You Are, so to speak. Because as Malebranche says — attention is the natural prayer of the soul¹.

See you in the next one,

Annabel

1. I will not claim to have found this quote all by myself. It was in Han’s book.