Reading

Essay 3

Photo by Georg Eiermann on Unsplash

No one steps into the same river twice — Heraclitus

Early on in my beekeeping career, my mentor took me to look at his bees. I saw a collection of wooden boxes carved into a steep, lawned garden in the sunshine above Grassington. But he saw something entirely different. He watched for a minute or so before speaking.

“The nectar flow has stopped.”

Nothing had changed that I could see. The bees were still flying and the meadows looked exactly as they had for days.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“They’re coming back quickly.”

He pointed towards the hive entrance.

“ …and they aren’t carrying much.”

Another pause.

“The blackberry must be nearly over.”

To him, this was apparent, but to me, it was invisible. We were standing in exactly the same place, we were looking at exactly the same bees, but only one of us could read what was happening.

It is easy to mistake this for expertise, years of knowledge and practice adding up to experience. These matter, but they are not enough. Many people possess knowledge but never learn to read in this way. Reading is something different.

It is less like accumulating information than entering into relationship. The beekeeper does not impose their meaning upon the hive. Nor does the hive whisper into the beekeeper’s ear. Something happens between them. Sustained attention has cultivated the ability to notice patterns that remain invisible to most of us. The hive has not changed as much as the beekeeper/reader has.

Think of a shepherd looking across a hillside, or a gardener kneeling beside a bed of vegetables, an experienced nurse walking onto a hospital ward, a musician listening to an orchestra tune up before a concert, or a parent hearing silence from an upstairs bedroom. Each notices something that others miss, not because they possess extraordinary senses, but because they have learned another way of attending.

To most of us the hillside is simply green, the vegetables seem healthy enough, the ward appears busy, the orchestra sounds chaotic and the house quiet. Yet someone who has lived in relationship with these places immediately senses when something is different. Not wrong, necessarily, just different. They cannot always explain how they know, sometimes they later discover they were mistaken, but often they discover they were not. Either way, the noticing comes before the explanation. Is this an experience you recognise from your own life?

There is a scene in Band of Brothers that has stayed with me for years. A patrol moves cautiously through woodland towards what they assume will be another German position, when something changes. The forest becomes strangely quiet. The soldiers slow down, but no one knows why, but they sense that something is wrong. Well, most of them do. They are reading the place, but their interpretation is mistaken. They imagine enemy troops waiting ahead, but instead they discover a concentration camp.

Their attention was not wrong, only their explanation, but that distinction matters. Reading does not guarantee certainty or truth. It asks us to remain faithful to what we have noticed before rushing to explain it. The living world asks us to notice before it allows us to approach an understanding. We often assume that reading means recognising, but perhaps it begins with noticing. Recognition says, “I know what this is.” Noticing says, “Something is here.” Recognition closes, while noticing opens.

One of my favourite sayings is that ‘none of us can read the same book, even when we read the same book’. At first this sounds absurd, the words remain exactly where they were, the pages are in the same order. Yet anyone who has returned to a favourite novel after twenty years knows the saying is true. You did not read the same book at sixteen that you will read at sixty. Not because the book has changed, but because you have. You notice different passages, different characters, different questions. The words remain remarkably stable, but the encounter does not.

Heraclitus was right. We cannot step into the same river twice, not because the river alone is changing, but because both river and traveller are always changing, becoming. Books, friendships, gardens, beehives and conversations are like that. What isn’t? Every encounter is new because neither participant stands still.

After Barry Lopez, we began noticing that we create wolves. Then we discovered that words like nuclear gather worlds around themselves until they feel like things in their own right. At this point it is tempting to imagine that the answer is to strip away the stories. To become more objective, to remove ourselves from the picture altogether. To be more scientific. But that is not what the beekeeper has done. They have not escaped stories, but acquired better ones. Stories tested against seasons and against failures. Against swarms and against long, hot afternoons sitting beside the hives with no purpose other than watching.

They have learned stories that remain willing to be corrected by the living world. The question is not whether we live by stories or facts, because we always live by stories. The question is whether our stories continue to listen. Modern life assumes that intelligence consists in having the right answers, but I think it begins in learning to notice before naming, before explaining, and before deciding. Every skilled craft works this way. The carpenter notices the grain, the potter notices the clay and the shepherd notices the flock. The clinician notices the patient. The musician notices the silence. The beekeeper notices the bees. If the encounter is with the theory rather than the experience then our stories are closed. No longer listening.

Perhaps that is what reading has always been, not the extraction of, or addition to, meaning, but the cultivation of faithful relationship. Every act of reading is an encounter and every encounter changes both the reader and the living world, however slightly. Perhaps that is why none of us can ever read the same book. Even when we read the same book. Because the thing we are reading is never simply the page before us. It is the meeting between a living world that is endlessly becoming and a reader who is becoming with it.