The Enchanted Hour

by Meghan Cox Gurdon

  “Phidias has been called the greatest sculptor who ever lived,” Hillyer writes,

  but he did a thing which the Greeks considered a crime and would not forgive. We do not see anything so terribly wrong in what he did, but the Greeks’ idea of right and wrong was different from ours. This is what he did. On the shield of the statue of Athena that he had made, Phidias carved a picture of himself and also one of his friend Pericles. It was merely a part of the decoration of the shield, and hardly anyone would have noticed it. But according to the Greek notion, it was a sacrilege to make a picture of a human being on the statue of a goddess. When the Athenians found out what Phidias had done, they threw him into prison, and there he died.

  There, in one short passage, is a dose of sensible, tolerant, age-appropriate historical perspective: “We do not see anything so terribly wrong in what he did, but the Greeks’ idea of right and wrong was different from ours.” The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. Children can understand this.

  In this context, reading aloud can become an act of respect for the generations that came before us, of humane resistance to the roving eye of the censor. To defend classic literature is not to defend prejudice. It is to argue for sympathy, and an openness to the past as well as to the insistent present. It is to recognize that as we judge the people of former times, so shall we be judged by future ones. Attributes of our contemporary life that we think unimpeachable or unavoidable will be held up by generations yet to come as evidence of our limits, our stupidity, our profligacy, our lack of vision. The present, as Walter Edmonds said, is “less than the wink of an eyelid in the face of time.”

  So yes, when you are reading aloud, by all means engage with the brilliant, flawed works of the past. Why not? The books you read will enrich your children’s lives long after they are grown and gone.

  And then—

  Well, it’s over. The bedraggled baby books, the stacks of picture books shorn of their dust jackets, the dog-eared paperbacks, the hardcover classics and the new novels with their crisp pages—they all get stowed, or sold, or given away. You’ve fought the good fight, you’ve run the race to the finish. You are done.

  Or are you?

  Sometimes we may forget that there’s more than one important dynamic in family life. The pleasure and value of reading aloud extends beyond parents reading to their children. The intellectual stimulus it brings, the emotional connection, the strange stir of shared literature; all this also happens when adults read to adults, when siblings read to siblings, and when, one day, grown-up children read out loud to their parents.

  Chapter 8

  From the Nursery to the Nursing Home

  Why Reading Aloud Never Gets Old

  Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.

  —Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

  Not long ago, a woman named Linda Khan was sitting by a hospital bed in Houston, Texas, feeling ill at ease. Beside her lay her eighty-eight-year-old father. His heart was faltering. He needed surgery.

  That wasn’t what was bothering Khan, though. What troubled her was that all day the two of them had engaged in nothing but depressing small talk. She loved and admired her father, and they’d always had good conversations, but now he seemed sunk in querulous contemplation of his predicament. He talked about the lousy hospital food, the tests, the doctors, the diagnosis, the potential outcomes. The scope of his once wide-ranging interests seemed to have shrunk to the size of the room. Khan, for her part, had a similar feeling that the world outside was becoming remote, disconnected, irrelevant.

  “It is really hard to sit with a person in a hospital,” Khan told me later. “They’re going through so much, and it feels like there’s nothing to talk about except their medical situation.”

  Casting around for a way to divert her father’s thoughts, Khan’s eye fell on a stack of books that people had brought to the hospital as gifts for him. Her father had always been a big reader, but of late he didn’t have the energy or focus.

  In that moment, Khan was struck with an epiphany. She picked up a copy of Young Titan, Michael Sheldon’s biography of Winston Churchill, and started to read it out loud.

  “Right away it changed the mood and atmosphere,” she told me. “It got him out of a rut of thinking about illness. It wasn’t mindless TV, and it wasn’t tiring for his brain or eyes because I was doing the reading.”

  That afternoon, Khan read to her father for an hour. It was a relief and a pleasure to both of them. Reading gave the daughter a way of connecting with her father and helping him in a situation that was otherwise out of her hands. Listening allowed the father to travel on the sound of his daughter’s voice, up and out of the solipsism of illness and back into the realm of mature intellectual engagement, where he felt himself again.

  “He’s in and out of the hospital a lot now,” Khan said, “and I always read to him. It’s usually military history or biography, not my usual stuff, but he has good taste. I’m happy.”

  For Neil Bush, the late-life hospitalizations of his famous parents, George H. W. and Barbara Bush, became opportunities to repay a debt of gratitude. “When I was a kid [my mother] would read to me and my siblings,” he told a reporter in the spring of 2018. With his parents in and out of care, he said, “We’ve been reading books about dad’s foreign policy and more recently, mom’s memoir.”

  Bush went on, his voice thick with emotion, “And to read the story of their amazing life together has been a remarkable blessing to me, personally, as their son.”

  The day after he gave the interview, his mother died at the age of ninety-two.

  In reading to their ailing parents, Linda Khan and Neil Bush returned to a traditional means of consoling the sick. They also joined excellent historical company. Among the many men and women over the centuries who have lifted the burden of a loved one’s confinement by reading out loud, we can count the great Albert Einstein. His sister Maja had suffered a stroke in her mid-sixties and remained bedridden for the rest of her life. According to a charming account in the New Yorker, Maja’s brilliant older brother would go up to her room in the evenings and sit for an hour or so, reading the Greeks: “Empedocles, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Thucydides receive the tribute of the most advanced and abstract modern science every night, in the calm voice of this affectionate brother who keeps his sister company.”

  Einstein was a man who appreciated higher planes of thought, as we know. Perhaps it was because of his almost superhuman intelligence that he was so sensitive to the plight of an active mind trapped in an earthbound body. Years earlier, at a birthday celebration for the theoretical physicist Max Planck, Einstein had talked of the human yearning for transcendence over coarse, quotidian things:

  I believe that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman’s irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

  A person who is limited by old age or illness may need the help of another to escape the “painful crudity and hopeless dreariness” of his circumstances. That is certainly the case with the title character of Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel The English Patient. Burned over most of his body, the man is acti
ve only in his thoughts, and the young Canadian nurse who reads aloud to him keeps mangling the Kipling.

  “Think about the speed of his pen,” he entreats her.

  The English patient’s request is a good reminder that reading aloud needs to be considerate and companionable. No one wants to hear a voice droning on without regard to the words or the listener. At its best and most uplifting, the experience becomes a piece of art that the reader pulls from thin air and gives as a gift to the hearer. The artwork is composed of a writer’s words and the music they make as they strike the ear, combined in the telling of a narrative that produces what radio dramatists used to call sound pictures, or “theater of the mind.”

  There is a performative element, too: the reader’s phrasing and intonation, the pauses between words and sentences, the timbre of the voice and its warmth or chill. All these things communicate themselves in a complex aesthetic experience that is as transient as breath and as comforting, as we saw with the babies in the NICU, as physical touch.

  And there is the giving of self. When we read to other people, we show them that they matter to us, that we want to expand time and attention and energy in order to bring them something good. In earlier chapters we saw the way that this works in young families, how shared stories can bind parents and children together and sweep them away in a lovely neurochemical tsunami. The same magic is at work when everyone involved has long since grown up.

  * * *

  IT CAME AS an unpleasant surprise to Lauri Hornik when her daughter announced, at the age of ten, that her mother’s services as a reader were no longer required. Ruby wanted to read on her own, at the faster speed of her own eyes. “That was a very sad moment for me, but I had to allow it,” Hornik told me.

  Three years went by, and reading aloud seemed a pleasure that had been relegated to yesteryear when a chance confluence of things occurred: Hornik and her partner, Peter, were embarking on a five-hour drive through the Adirondacks; cell coverage was poor; and Hornik had just got her hands on the unpublished manuscript of John Green’s hotly awaited 2017 young adult book Turtles All the Way Down. As the president and publisher of Dial Books for Young Readers, Hornik was one of the first people in her industry to see Green’s latest novel since The Fault in Our Stars. She was longing to dig in, but felt it would be boorish to read to herself while Peter did all the driving.

  “I couldn’t wait,” she said, “so I started reading it out loud to Peter, and I think we went for several hours of just me reading it to him, because we couldn’t stop. Reading it aloud was such an experience of being in the head of the main character. If you’re reading a first-person account aloud, then all the more you are that character. So it was very deep and meaningful to me. I think also, when you’re not reading aloud, you’re often sort of skimming, so that each sentence doesn’t necessarily resonate in the way that it does when you’re reading it out loud.”

  That resonance is best achieved when the reader takes his time. As the English patient warned, it is all too easy for eyes to be “too quick and North American,” zipping along, skittering and jumping and taking in meaning by the glance. The ear demands a steadier pacing. Indeed, by its deliberate nature, reading aloud forces us to interact with writing in the way that Vladimir Nabokov said we ought.

  “Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed,” the novelist once wrote; “Then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish. Then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.”

  When we experience a text out loud, word by word, we give weight and value to language even as we are subsumed by it. The effect is not just pleasurable. The companionship and intellectual stimulus reading aloud provides seems also—in real ways—to promote the health and well-being of both the reader and the listener.

  * * *

  ONE JUNE AFTERNOON in North London, not so long ago, half a dozen elderly people sat in comfortable chairs at two round tables on the fourth floor of a facility for the frail and aged. Outside, clouds hung flat and heavy in the sky. Inside, the meeting place was pleasant and hotel-like, with soft carpeting and stand-alone bookcases. There was no medicinal smell, no sign of the violent catastrophe that had shaped these people’s lives.

  A younger woman, Kate Fulton, had just served hot cups of tea all around, and now she handed out sheaves of stapled photocopies.

  “Right,” Fulton said as she slid into her chair, “we’ve got a story by Doris Lessing,”

  “Doris Lessing,” someone echoed.

  “I think she went to the same school I did,” came a languid voice.

  Fulton smiled. “Just to remind, there are no rules other than—”

  “Listening.”

  “No, not that one. No reading ahead!”

  Amusement ran around the tables. Everyone knew this. It was being explained for my benefit.

  “The whole point of this group is to be in the moment with the literature,” Fulton said to me, “so that when we stop, we see where we are. And we assess. We’re only at a moment in time.”

  She turned back to the group. “Everybody ready? Right, I’m going to start. ‘Flight,’ by Doris Lessing. ‘Flight.’”

  “Is she still alive?”

  “No, she has died,” said Fulton, “so it’s an homage to her today.”

  After a pause, she began to read. Her words were loud and crisp. She watched carefully where the commas fell.

  Above the old man’s head was the dovecote, a tall wire-netted shelf on stilts, full of strutting, preening birds. The sunlight broke on their gray breasts into small rainbows. His ears were lulled by their crooning, his hands stretched up towards his favorite, a homing pigeon, a young plump-bodied bird which stood still when it saw him and cocked a shrewd bright eye.

  “Pretty, pretty, pretty,” he said.

  Most of the old people at the tables sat unmoving, their faces angled down as they followed the story in their booklets. Behind dark glasses, one woman, who was blind, had her face turned toward the reader. The room was filled with a kind of quiet, concentrated intelligence. There was an open and interested knowingness in this group of people whose accents—Gallic, Teutonic, English expatriate—hinted at the postwar diaspora that had brought them all to the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green. All were Holocaust survivors, with backgrounds as varied as their accents. Several of the women had PhDs, and one had taught literature at a university. The sole man, a cheerful South Londoner, described himself as “Not clever, me. Bottom of the class!”

  Whatever their separate lives had been, they now spent an hour and a half every week sitting together and enjoying literature out loud.

  “‘Her hair fell down her back in a wave of sunlight . . .’”

  As Fulton reached the end of the first page, there was a soft, prolonged flapping as people turned to the next sheet.

  “‘. . . and her long bare legs repeated the angles of the frangipani stems, bare, shining-brown stems among patterns of pale blossoms,’” the reader continued, describing the teenage granddaughter who upsets her dovecote-tending grandfather in Lessing’s story. The man sees the girl, and puts the pigeon away roughly. Wary, the two characters greet each other. There is some cause of strain between them.

  At this point, Fulton looked up from the text.

  “Okay,” she said, “where do you think we are?”

  “In the country?”

  “By a railway line.”

  “What do you make of the old man, so far?”

  “He’s a bit moody.”

  “Moody? What makes you think that?” asked Fulton.

  “Oh, well, he suddenly decides to shut his favorite bird in a cage.”

  “Right. He was fine before, but there was a sudden change in his mood, wasn�
��t there? When did that happen?”

  “When he saw his daughter—no, his granddaughter—swinging on the gate,” said the man.

  “Yes, what do you think he’s feeling?” Fulton asked. “Imagine him, he’s sitting—put him in his space—he’s in the countryside, I don’t know where it has red soil, anybody know? Highlands, lowlands, somewhere where there’s red soil?”

  * * *

  WHEN I VISITED Golders Green, Kate Fulton had been reading aloud with the group every week for five years, having given up her career in law to “nourish the soul rather than the bank balance,” as she put it. Her group ran under the auspices of The Reader, a national charity founded in 2002 by Jane Davis, a professor at the University of Liverpool who wanted to bring great literature out of the ivory tower and into places where ordinary people live, and in particular to places where they suffer.

  The Reader sponsors hundreds of groups in Great Britain, by no means primarily for older people. There are groups for schoolchildren and foster children, teenagers and prisoners, patients in neurological rehabilitation units and inmates of psychiatric wards, recovering drug addicts and people with Alzheimer’s disease, as well as for nurses and other stressed-out caregivers.

  Whatever the makeup of the group, the protocol is the same. The facilitators are trained to read in calm, modulated tones rather than with a lot of theatrical acting-out, so that the author’s language can come through in a clean and unadorned manner. Occasionally other people at the table will take a turn reading that week’s material, which in most cases consists of a short story and a couple of poems.

  “I have to make sure the imaginative places that I take them from are varied,” Fulton told me.

  We went to a magic shop with H. G. Wells the other week. We’re walking down some Russian street with Chekhov, we’re somewhere with Maupassant, or actually we’re just having a door fixed with Rose Tremaine.

  They enjoy it very much. I had one lady who never spoke. Remember, these people have had quite a difficult past, even if they were only in camps until they were eight. It can affect you hugely. This lady had been evacuated, but I didn’t know because she never spoke. We read a poem, Longfellow’s “The Arrow and the Song,” and it’s all about friendship. She suddenly said: “That’s a song, you know, Kate.”