A Syllabus for Attention
In Lit Hub, Megan Mayhew Bergman MFA '10 shares the lessons she learned from time spent with Middlebury College faculty member emeritus John Elder, whose personal practice of sharing and reading books aloud with his wife Rita invites the couple to slow down, integrate, and live alongside stories.
Writes Mayhew Bergman:
"We usually encounter a syllabus when we’re young. Someone older decides what we should put into our minds. Here are the books. Here are the questions. Here is the sequence in which we will encounter them. For a few months, someone else assumes responsibility for directing our attention. Eventually, we must do the same for ourselves.
"What will I read? What ideas will I live beside? Which voices will I return to? What deserves rereading? What will I memorize? What will I allow to alter me?
"John is well-traveled, though his physical world is now rooted in Vermont. Even though he and Rita spend their days in their thoughtfully-designed home, their interior geography extends much further: through poetry and theology, natural history and literature, across centuries and continents. Deep reading seems to have created a particular kind of associative richness. A bird can call up a poem. A mountain, a remembered passage. Grief can suddenly illuminate something read forty years before.
We tend to talk about reading as a way of acquiring knowledge. Listening to John made me think that a lifetime of reading leaves us accompanied."