Reading Is Hallucinating

I have this theory that, no matter how weird reality is, we can never fully comprehend its weirdness because, well, it’s reality: it’s all we know.

For example, take reading.

Every art form is predicated on a physical medium which is predicated on one or more senses: a painting, pigments, sight; a song, a voice and/or instruments, hearing; dance, the human body, sight again.¹ Origami uses paper. Bonsai uses trees. Cooking uses food. I know this is all very obvious.

But what about books?

A naive answer would say books are predicated on paper and ink and sight. But that’s not correct, is it? I know there are still some hold-outs in the “listening to a book isn’t reading a book” war, but when it comes down to it, if you asked someone who read A Confederacy of Dunces and someone who listened to A Confederacy of Dunces what the opening line is, they’ll both answer,

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head.

If you really want to embarrass the “listening isn’t reading” crowd, just shame them with disability arguments: “Would you tell a deaf person they’ve never read a book because they’ve only listened to them on tape? Would you tell a blind person they’ve never read a book because they’ve only felt them in braille?”

So no, a book’s medium isn’t paper and ink.

A better answer is that books are predicated on words. This is weird, because words are these Platonic things that seem to exist outside of a physical substrate. I say “seem to” because, at the end of the day, they exist in the brain or in sound waves or on paper and ink, depending, respectively, on whether we’re thinking, speaking, or reading them. But words are also like triangles. I remember a philosophy professor once explaining that there will never be a perfect triangle because, no matter how carefully drawn, the lines will contain some imperfections and thus will never be exactly right. So where do triangles exist? The same place words do, I guess.

This leads to the weirdness I mentioned in my first paragraph: the same book exist in different mediums. Again, I know this all very obvious, but take a minute and try to grasp how bizarre that actually is. Can you imagine a world where we could listen to a statue? Where a book could be made into a film and not be an adaptation but the exact same experience? Where reading sheet music were no different than listening to a orchestra? Where you could watch a meal or smell a dance or taste a play?!

I’ll admit there’s the slightest difference between seeing or hearing or touching the words, but I defer to my Confederacy of Dunces example: however you consume the writing, you get the exact same story. No one listens to that book and comes away thinking Ignatius Reilly is a svelte, mentally mature man who isn’t obsessed with Boethius.

So “books are predicated on words” is better than “books are predicated on paper and ink.” But that leads to its own problem. Specifically, that makes it sound like when reading a book we all have the exact same experience. After all, I’ve been arguing that changing the medium doesn’t change the story. But “everyone has the same experience when reading a book” is obviously wrong: reading is a more individualized experience than music or dance or film. You and I might picture completely different versions of Ignatius Reilly, but we’d never claim a piano is a trombone, a plié is a cabriole, or Dylan McDermott is Dermot Mulroney.²

So let me go even further: the medium of a book is hallucination. The reason a book can change mediums and stay the same is because whether you see it, hear it, or feel it, it hasn’t actually changed mediums.

In my essay on Tender Buttons I quoted the rabbit-hole scene from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

First, she tried to look down and make out what she was coming to, but it was too dark to see anything; then she looked at the sides of the well, and noticed that they were filled with cupboards and book–shelves; here and there she saw maps and pictures hung upon pegs. She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labelled ‘ORANGE MARMALADE’, but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.

I then pointed out how “threadbare” this description is compared to the imagery in my mind:

I know the shelves are wooden rather than metal. I know they’re sloppily overstuffed with books (some lying on their sides) and bric-a-brac (not just maps and jars, but candles, small toys, lamps, etc.). I know the pictures on the wall definitely include a painting of a dodo. My mind adds a thousand details to the scene.

This adding of details, by the way, is why I don’t think videogames are more cognitively challenging / rewarding than books. About fifteen years ago I read something like, “If videogames were thousands of years old and books had just been invented, and all the young people were giving up the former for the latter, then everyone would be freaking out about how young people’s brains are going to turn to mush because in books you have to restricted by the text but in videogames you get to make choices.”

The fact that to reading is hallucinating exposes the lie in this argument. To put it in gamer terms: when you read a book you are rendering, in real time, an entire virtual reality in your head. Shooting this zombie first and that zombie second does not compare.

Relatedly, I think the people who don’t like reading are the people who have a hard time hallucinating. I can’t imagine the misery of being dyslexic, always focusing on the words as words, never getting lost in the story.³ There are a lot of things I like about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—the puns, the characters, the poems—but there’s really only one reason it’s my favorite novel: it’s the book that made me hallucinate the most. I remember, as a kid, reading in my bed at night. I was there. I mean it: I was there. My eyes stopped seeing words, stopped seeing pages, stopped seeing anything but Wonderland. I saw Bill the Lizard go flying through the air. I witnessed that sneezing baby turn into a pig. I watched Alice wrestle her flamingo into a croquet mallet. I was gone.

I wish I could tell the people who don’t like to read not to get discouraged if they have trouble hallucinating. It won’t always happen. I recently finished IT by Stephen King, and in every scene some details were in focus, some details were blurry, and some details weren’t there at all. Some shifted in ways I couldn’t control, some were the opposite of the explicitly stated facts no matter how hard I tried to correct them, and some were overridden by the 1990 miniseries that scared me shitless as a kid (adult Richie is Harry Anderson and that’s all there is to it). That’s why I don’t watch film adaptations of my favorite books. The wardrobe to Narnia looks like the wardrobe from my childhood home, and I will never let a filmmaker change that.

And it’s not like this applies to soup recipes and historical facts and IKEA instructions. That’s okay: sometimes the job of words is to relay information. But if you’re reading a story and you’re not lost in the world, don’t sweat it, just keep reading and you’ll hallucinate if you can. I’ve always found “the way to try is to not try” insufferable advice, but, sorry, that’s the way it is.

A final note on why we read. Every so often I’ll come across an essay that says reading make you more empathetic or smarter or politically correct or whatever. I know the authors are coming from a good place, but those articles make me want to tear my hair out. I agree with Kant: the point of art is that it has no point. That may sound denigrating, but if art is for something, it becomes a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and that’s actually denigrating.

The real point of art—drumroll, please, while I answer a philosophical question as old as mankind—is to pass the time. I know, I know: I’d get kicked out of the Dead Poet’s Society for not being lofty enough. But if you think I’m wrong, spend a week without it. No books, no movies, no songs. No TV shows or YouTube videos or art museums. No bonsai trees, no dancing, no nothin’. All you’ll have left is gossip and sports (both of which, per my reasoning, fulfill a similar function as art). The hours will drag out to infinity and you will thank God when you are finally allowed to pick up a book and dream the day away, living a thousand lives, discovering a thousand worlds, experiencing a thousand things.

1. Speaking of dance: have you seen the best video on YouTube? This is from A Ballet in Sneakers by Jerome Robbins, the guy who choreographed West Side Story. You have to buy the DVD to see the whole performance: it’s worth it.

2. Uhhh, maybe that last example is working against me. Second-best video on YouTube, right here.

3. Though I can almost imagine it. A few years ago I tried to read a manga by Hayao Miyazaki. It was translated to English, but the first page had a warning: “STOP! This is not the first page of the book! In keeping with the Japanese original, you begin this manga on the ‘last’ page and read it right to left!” The experience was headache-inducing. I really wanted to read that book. I gave up after an hour.