From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
In Praise of Reading Aloud
The sweet comfort of words between friends.
Just for the pleasure of it, just for hearing how the cadence and rhymes draw you toward that last lovely word, try reading the following lines out loud:
Follow, poet, follow rightNow try reading them to someone you love.
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
In a dark season, one indeed wants a reason to rejoice, and W.H. Auden understood the power of words to provide it. One also wants domestic rituals more sustaining to the aching soul than coming home to a TV set. So I write here in praise of a favorite practice of my own family: reading to each other aloud.
Many of us were read to as children, of course, and may now read to our own. But how often these days do adults read to one another? We are too busy, too wary perhaps of a pastime so decidedly of the past. But reading aloud lets you hear each others' voices in a new way, and value afresh the power of the English language. At its best, it can conjure an enchanted circle.
It's worth hunting down the philosopher Bertrand Russell's autobiography just to read aloud the crisp, heartfelt prologue, which begins: "Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind." Or step for a moment into the world Mark Helprin creates in his short story "Tamar," invoking Eastern Europe on the eve of World War II: "How misty and beautiful it was that autumn. I cannot describe the quiet. It was as if the nineteenth century--indeed, all the past--were in hiding and feared to give itself away."
One of the best memories I have is of a freezing afternoon in Chicago, years ago, when my family, home for the holidays, ransacked the bookshelves to read aloud the stories, poems or passages we found most beautiful and my father choked up while trying to read the closing lines of "Charlotte's Web," by E.B. White. It is the story of a spider who saves a pig; more than that, it is a tale of mortality and abiding love: "It is not often someone comes along who is a true friend" was part of what he read aloud. It was the first time I had seen my father cry.
Sometimes reading aloud can stop the weeping. In the week following Sept. 11, a colleague and I pulled out some verses by Robert Service, the vagabond bard of the Yukon, and with gestures and flourishes and a sort of wry defiance declaimed such lines as: "the code of a Man says: 'Fight all you can.' . . . It's the hell served for breakfast that's hard."
But it's usually better just to read slowly and clearly, to savor the words. Feel the yearning pull of the closing phrases of E. Annie Proulx's "The Shipping News": "It may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind may be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery."
There has been much mention lately of Joseph Conrad, of his stories of terrorism and darkness. But one of my favorite Conrad tales is full of humor. "Youth" is a sailor's account of his first voyage to the Far East, aboard a ship so disaster-prone that it finally sank--a misadventure that only increased the fervor with which he fell in love with Asia: "I came upon it from a tussle with the sea--and I was young."
Another set of stories wonderfully lyrical to read aloud is by Antoine de St. Exupery, best known as author of "The Little Prince." In "Wind, Sand and Stars," the French aviator describes flying in fog, at night, lost off the coast of Africa, figuring he was too low on fuel to make it back. As he prepared for death, from headquarters burst a message of life: "Your reserve tanks bigger than standard. You have two hours fuel left. Proceed to Cisneros."
A passage of haunting grace comes at the end of "A River Runs Through It," Norman Maclean's memoir about growing up in Montana with a brother he loved but could not save. Mr. Maclean describes returning as an old man, fishing alone in the evening. Listen for the rhythm of the fly-fisherman's cast in the sentence itself: "Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise."
Some folks I know who read aloud to friends favor Winston Churchill, whose cadences roll off the tongue; one fellow recommends--I kid you not--Nietzsche.
Just for the glory of it, here's one more verse from the Auden poem cited at the top of this article, written in memory of William Butler Yeats--a poet who himself believed that language attains its true power when read aloud:
In the deserts of the heartSure beats CNN, doesn't it?
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her "America the Beautiful" column appears Thursdays.
