How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [156]
The Syntopicon has one major defect, of course. It is an index of just one set of books ( albeit a large one ) , and it gives only a very rough indication of where passages may be found in other books that are not included in the set. Nevertheless, it always provides you with at least a place to start on any syntopical reading project. And it is also true that the books included in the set are ones that you would almost always want to read anyway, in the course of any such project. Thus the Syntopicon should be able to save the mature scholar or reader who is beginning his research into a certain problem much of the preliminary labor of research, and advance him rapidly to the point where he can begin to think independently about it, because he knows what thinking has been done.
The Fourth level of Reading: Syntopical Reading 331
Useful as the Syntopicon is for that kind of reader, it is much more useful for the beginner. The Syntopicon can help such a reader in three ways: initiatively, suggestively, and instructively.
It works initiatively by overcoming the initial difficulty that anyone faces when confronted by the classical books of our tradition. These works are a little overpowering. We may wish that we had read them, but often we do not do so. We find ourselves advised from all sides to read them, and we are given reading programs, beging with the easier works and proceeding to the more difficult ones. But all such programs require the reading of whole books or, at least, the integral reading of large parts of them. It is a matter of general experience that this kind of solution seldom achieves the desired result.
A syntopical reading of these major works with the aid of the Syntopicon provides a radically diHerent solution. The Syntopicon initiates the reading of great books by enabling persons to read particular ones on the subjects in which they are interested; and on those subjects, to read relatively short passages from a large number of authors. It helps us to read in the great books before we have read through them.
Syntopical reading in the great books, with the help of the Syntopicon, may also work suggestively. Starting from the reader's existing interest in a particular subject, it may arouse or create other interests in related subjects. And once started on an author, it is hard not to explore the context. Before you know it, you have read a good portion of the book.
Finally, syntopical reading with the aid of the Syntopicon works instructively, in three distinct ways. This, in fact, is one of the major benefits of this level of reading.
First, the topic in connection with which the passage is being read serves to give direction to the reader in interpreting the passage. But it does not tell him what the passage means, since the passage may be relevant to the topic in several or many diHerent ways. Hence the reader is called upon to dis-332 HOW TO READ A BOOK
cover precisely what relevance the passage has to the topic.
To learn to do this is to acquire a major skill in the art of reading.
Second, the collection of a number of passages on the same topic, but from different works and different authors, serves to sharpen the readers interpretation of each passage read. Sometimes, when passages from the same book are read in sequence and in the context of one another, each becomes clearer. Sometimes the meaning of each of a series of contrasting or conflicting passages from diferent books is accentuated when they are read against one another. And