Preconditions For Thought

     My Gentle Readers won’t be surprised to learn that my favorite discretionary activity is reading. Yet it’s a rare thing to encounter a devoted reader today. Getting rarer, too. And that’s not entirely because most of what's published today isn’t fit to line a cat’s litter pan.

     I routinely ask new acquaintances if they like to read. More often than not, the answer I get is “I don’t have the time.” Ponder that for a moment. Reading has been called the key to knowledge. Indeed, for most of human history, it was the only route to knowledge beyond whatever one’s elders could convey. But today it’s in a state of desuetude.

     I submit that that’s not because there are other, preferable avenues to knowledge available to us. Rather, it’s because the preconditions for reading have been all but eliminated from our lives... in many cases, with our cooperation.

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     The preconditions for reading are time and silence.

     Yes, yes, I know that a lot of people claim that they must have music on “to concentrate.” Don’t believe it for a minute; I don’t. Music worth listening to commands one’s attention. But then, most popular music isn’t worth listening to, is it? Maybe its consumers use it to block out the other sounds around them... or to “fill the silence.”

     As I noted above, time is something a lot of people claim to lack. It isn’t so. The typical American’s life is filled not with obligations but with discretionary activities. Those activities may be rationalized as “important” or “good for you,” but that doesn’t change their discretionary nature. No one forces you to go to the gym, or the yoga class, or the library’s latest lecture on contemporary knitting practices.

     One of the consequences is that when time unallocated to any activity is upon us, we immediately look for distractions with which to consume it. There are plenty such available, of course. A little time on Facebook, or X / Twitter, will provide them in bushelfuls.

     Anything but read, or enjoy the silence and think.

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     As it’s been a while, let’s have a little C. S. Lewis:

     Music and silence—how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell—though longer ago than humans, reckoning in light years, could express—no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise—Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile—Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end. We have already made great strides in this direction as regards the Earth. The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down in the end.

     That’s Lewis’s devil-protagonist Screwtape speaking, of course. Lewis characterized the demonic as insatiability, a lust to consume without limit. That hunger embraces all things. Just as Ungoliant demanded that Melkor release the Silmarils so that that ever-hungering spider might consume them, the demonic seeks to consume all that is good. That includes ourselves, whatever we have made that is good, and silence.

     Note especially Screwtape’s observation that noise “defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires.” He didn’t say thought, but it’s inescapably implied. A noisy environment prevents concentration. Thought demands concentration. If there are any blessed souls who can think effectively despite all-embracing noise, I haven’t met them. I know I can’t.

     It’s no coincidence that the preconditions for reading are also those for thought. To read profitably – that is, to make sense of the material and integrate it into one’s store of knowledge – demands that the reader think, even if the process seems distant from the more conventional notion of thought as a deliberate process applied to the solution of problems.

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     A delightful young woman on X / Twitter, whose moniker is “Barefoot Pregnant,” said just today:

🧵(1/5) "The ability to simply THINK is the best gift we can give our children — and ourselves.

We can’t do it when we’re overstimulated, when we have too much to do — it really only happens through “boredom” and stillness.

— Barefoot Pregnant (@usuallypregnant) September 28, 2025

     Note the sarcasm-quotes around boredom A lot of people conflate stillness and silence with boredom. No abstract notion more destructive has ever been expressed. Stillness and silence are the womb of thought! Without those preconditions, human existence reduces to motion alone. Whether patterned or random, motion devoid of thought is barren.

     From thought are all good things born.

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     One more quote and I’ll close for today:

     Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. – Bertrand Russell

     And it is so. Why else would we so relentlessly seek distractions? Once the obligations and distractions are shoved aside and the noise quenched, we begin to think – and no one, be he a millennial genius or a dunce suited only to shoveling shit, can predict what will emerge.

     Thought is our creative capacity in motion. The universe itself is only a thought in the mind of God. It is when we think that we are most like God.

     Give those you love the preconditions for thought: stillness and silence. Help them to find those things. Especially provide them to your children. You’ll be astounded by what will come of it.

     And who knows? They might even pick up a book.