Read Old Books
Lewis did not read old books out of nostalgia. He believed they did something new books structurally can’t: They show you the water you’re swimming in. Every generation has its own blind spots—deeply shared assumptions that no one takes time to question. A new book, however brilliant, is written by someone standing inside those same blind spots. An old book gives us a new way of looking at the world.
Lewis described the opposite of this practice “chronological snobbery,” and calls for readers to press themselves to read old books, like work from Church Fathers, Greek myths, and even random European histories.
Froissart’s, “Chroniques” is not a book many would choose for pleasure. It’s a sprawling, digressive 14th-century account of a minor portion of European history and, by Lewis’s own admission, dull. He didn’t pretend otherwise. What he did instead of declining to read was build a method that could tame a genuinely difficult old book into something useful. Lewis’s reading method can accomplish this with even the most forbidding book.
Taming Difficult Books
The method Lewis wrote to is evidenced and common in his personal library. But not every book receives the same treatment. If you ever have the opportunity to visit the collections at the Wade Center at Wheaton College or the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, you can observe which books Lewis thought deserved the full method and which ones did not.
The map that Lewis mentions is the least common of his tools for understanding a book. But the idea holds up. When you begin a new book, browse the table of contents, read the introductions and conclusions. A mental map of the book helps you place details and difficulties in their proper place. The only book in which I have seen Lewis provide a map is in the back of his copy of Richard Hooker’s “Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.” The map clarifies how Hooker organizes his polity and ideas.
The truth is that Lewis’s suggestion to Greaves is more “do as I say” than “do as I do.” The headlines, like the maps, are rare in his library. The key parts of Hooker have a few headlines, but most books you can flip through from Lewis’s library do not have them; you are more likely to find a stray exclamation point, question mark, or exasperating comment: “Bosh!” However, when Lewis read Athanasius’s, “On the Incarnation,” he gave a headline on every page. The Christian classic, for which Lewis wrote the introduction to for a new translation for his friend Sister Penelope, has the most annotations of any book I’ve seen. He offers his own translations from the Greek at times, but every page receives a headline to explain it. It would seem that his title for the book, and his first headline, was “The Scandal of the Incarnation.”
While maps and headlines are rare in Lewis’s work, his true reading habit comes with underlines and their corresponding index. Lewis underlines often; he will underline a whole paragraph with a line alongside it. And when he underlines, he places an index at the back. On a research side alone, the value of the practice is obvious. You do not have to wonder on what page the author made a key point. If you are like me and have a glitchy, partial photographic memory, all you can remember is that “Lewis said that thing on the top half of that page on the left side.”
Reading like Lewis means wrestling and taming all sorts of books. You do not have to follow his whole method, even he does not do that. But approaching books with a plan for how to read and understand them will make for a more fruitful and easy way to revisit the book in the future.
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