How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [52]
That is what people mean when they say of a book that it is all Greek to them. They simply have not tried to understand it, which would be justifiable if it were really in Greek. But most of the words in any English book are familiar words.
These words surround the strange words, the technical words, the words that may cause the reader some trouble. The surrounding words are the context for the words to be interpreted.
The reader has all the materials he needs to do the job.
We are not pretending the job is an easy one. We are only insisting that it is not an impossible one. If it were, no one could read a book to gain in understanding. The fact that a book can give you new insights or enlighten you indicates that it probably contains words you may not readily understand. If you could not come to understand those words by· your own efforts, then the kind of reading we are talking about would be impossible. It would be impossible to pass from understanding less to understanding more by your own operations on a book.
There is no rule of thumb for doing this. The process is something like the trial-and-error method of putting a jigsaw puzzle together. The more parts you put together, the easier it is to find places for the remaining parts, if only because there are fewer of them. A book comes to you with a large number of words already in place. A word in place is a term. It is definitely located by the meaning that you and the author share in using it. The remaining words must be put in place.
You do this by trying to make them fit this way or that. The better you understand the picture that the words so far in place already partially reveal, the easier it is to complete the picture by making terms of the remaining words. Each word put into place makes the next adjustment easier.
You will make errors, of course, in the process. You will Coming to Terms With an Author 1 09
think you have managed to find where a word belongs and how it fits, only to discover later that the placement of another word requires you to make a whole series of readjustments.
The errors will get corrected because, so long as they are not found out, the picture cannot be completed. Once you have had any experience at all in this work of coming to terms, you will soon be able to check yourself. You will know whether you have succeeded or not. You will not blithely think you understand when you do not.
In comparing a book to a jigsaw puzzle, we have made one assumption that is not true. A good puzzle is, of course, one all of whose parts fit. The picture can be perfectly completed. The same is true of the ideally good book, but there is no such book. In proportion as books are good, their terms will be so well made and put together by the author that the reader can do the work of interpretation fruitfully. Here, as in the case of every other rule of reading, bad books are less readable than good ones. The rules do not work on them, except to show you how bad they are. If the author uses words ambiguously you cannot find out what he is trying to say. You can only find out that he has not been precise.
But, you may ask, does not an author who uses a word in more than a single sense use it ambiguously? And is it not the usual practice for authors to use words in several senses, especially their most important words?
The answer to the first question is No; to the second, Yes.
To use a word ambiguously is to use it in several senses without distinguishing or relating their meanings. ( For example, we have probably used the word "important" ambiguously in this chapter, for we were not always clear as to whether we meant important for the author or important for you. ) The author who does that has not made terms that the reader can come to. But the author who distinguishes the several senses in which he is using a critical word and enables the reader to make a responsive