The Dangerous Passivity of Listening to Books

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A friend shared Elisabeth Egan’s piece with me in The New York Times titled “Why I Stopped Reading and Embraced Audiobooks.” Egan is a writer and an editor at the New York Times Book Review.

Alas, I had to read it. And what I read horrified me. Here’s why.

Egan proudly describes listening to a 45-hour-long book, a biography of Sylvia Plath, as “the Mount Everest of listening.” While passively engaging with the material, Egan “summited, knitting a chunky striped blanket along the way. [She] never looked back.”

She is not mentioning junk books or mystery escapes. No. She listened to Abraham Verghese’s latest novel, The Covenant of Water (31 hours); Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (25 hours), The Fraud by Zadie Smith (only 12 hours and 26 minutes), etc.

In the last five years, Egan writes that she has “migrated from books on paper to books in [her] ears.” Her kids were grown; the house had become “too quiet.” She also likes being able to listen “all the time, not just while sitting still.” Thus, she listens while she brushes her teeth, unloads the dishwasher, makes her bed, while commuting to work, while waiting in line, driving, walking, knitting, doing needlepoint, decoupage, and becoming so totally immersed in listening that, like a “runner’s high” (she writes), she’s “here to tell you about the listener’s trance.”

This is precisely what horrified me. She is neither “reading” nor engaging with her immediate surrounding reality. This includes other people, as well as intimates. She is neither engaging with others in real time, nor is she reading in a way that allows her to pause, stop, and think, about the words, about the ideas, nor can she easily take notes or copy a passage. “Listening” to books is also a way of easily never feeling alone (when you truly are), a very passive way of “reading.” It is also a way to be far too easily influenced by what you are hearing, perhaps even hypnotized by it. It is definitely a Brave New World in which Big Brother is speaking to you around the clock.

Actually, being read to returns us to childhood and to preliterate times, to before Gutenberg invented the printing press; times when everything important had to be read aloud to people. The Torah. The Prophets. Homer’s The Odyssey. The New Testament.

I understand. I understand the ease which technology has led us. It is easier to bring 50 books along with you on vacation via kindle rather than pack them into one or even two suitcases. However, whenever I’ve done that, I’ve only read escape stories, mere entertainment. When I read a book, I often mark pages with post-its, bracket and underline passages so that I may easily be able to find these statements or even write something about them.

Look: I first became alarmed by the dangers of massive public disassociation, when I saw a young mother on her cellphone wearing ear buds, as she crossed a city street with her baby in a stroller. What! She did not look both ways, she did not check the lights or the oncoming human traffic. She, too, was “elsewhere,” in a “trance,” having rejected or spared herself a living reality.

Well, I come from another time, long ago and far away, when reading was not primarily meant to be an escape, or a form of entertainment. Clearly, I am now part of an honorable minority; a fast-vanishing tribe of dinosaurs.

By the way: Allow me to recommend the film Hamnet. Oh, what a weep-fest that was. What acting (Jessie Buckley), what directing (Chloe Zhao)—whether this was a true story about the Bard or only fiction, it mattered not. We were drawn into the experience of how dark Stratford-on-Avon was, how muddy, how wet, how uncomfortable, how vulnerable to diseases of all kinds; drawn into Will’s wife as the daughter of a “forest witch,” herself a wild, psychic, force of Nature, an herbalist, a woman who goes off by herself to give birth alone next to a tree. As played by Buckley she is amazing. Her facial expressions tell us more than words could ever convey.

Their son Hamnet has died of the plague. Will is in London writing a play, in an attic, by candlelight, and directing a performance. Agnes, his wife, is in a rage and travels to London to confront him. She is drawn to the Globe Theater’s premiere performance of “Hamlet” and, as she positions herself right in front of the stage, she begins to understand that Shakespeare was also grieving their son’s death. As the actor playing Hamlet slowly, slowly dies, the audience moves ever further, to touch him, to love him, to mourn his death.

Agnes understands that her husband had immortalized their son Hamnet as a way of grieving. This last scene is very powerful.

And no, I would not want to “listen” to Hamlet. I would either prefer reading it or better yet, seeing it performed on the stage in real time but only by the very best “players,” for that is what they called actors in Elizabethan England.