“Reading is ultimately a retreat into silence.”

Daniel Pennac, in The Rights of the Reader (2006), said that reading is ultimately a retreat into silence. I thought about why this is and then wrote the following list:

1. Although we are not alone, we read alone.
2. Although what happens when we read is not quiet, it makes us quiet.
3. What we see and sense when we read happens inwardly no matter how powerful, and the more devastating the experience, the deeper the retreat.
4. Even though reading is all about the written word, a book can leave us with no words to describe it. This is because we are not describing the book, we are describing what our self has become after reading it, and this is often too new to have any vocabulary yet.
5. Reading draws on and makes use of what we already know and what we already are, and then somehow turns this material broadside and sends it (and us) bowling down new allies.
6. Reading can reach our hidden and distraught places (the ones that live on piles of silence) and let in some air.
7. Reading is private and delicate and social and diabolical.
8. It is only in silence that we can find our troubles, and reading provides a safe balcony to look from.
9. Reading leaves us alone to find our own face.
10. Although we are alone, we actually don’t read alone.

Illustration by Lorena Spurio