Reading Inside and Out
How the scholastic practice of meditatio can help you become a better reader
Table of Contents
The Scholastic Way of Reading
Hundreds of years ago, scholastic monks would divide reading into lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio.
You can read about these four stages of reading here, though for our purposes I’d like to focus on the practices of lectio and meditatio. Oratio and contemplatio are more religious, or transcendent, practices that don’t quite suit most reading.
You’re unlikely to use a copy of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up to tap into the divine or contemplate God and the mysteries of existence, which is where oratio and contemplatio are meant to bring you.
However, meditatio is something that can benefit all manners of reading, and that’s what I’ll be writing about today.
The Limits of Surface Reading
Most readers generally get stuck at the first stage of reading, lectio, where they simply consume the words they encounter on a page without ever properly engaging with those words. They spend too much time on the surface of a book, and not enough time internalizing it.
My memory practice took off once I started splitting reading into “encountering” a book and “engaging” a book, which matches quite nicely with the lectio and meditatio aspects of medieval reading.
It’s not much of a stretch to say that lectio is reading a book from the outside in, while meditatio is reading a book from the inside out, since in meditatio, you have to read your memories of the book instead of the physical book itself.
Inside Reading Defined
Inside reading is my take on meditatio, and it’s what turns a book into actual knowledge. Most readers lack a deliberate framework for inside reading, though they still engage in the practice, since the only way to turn words on a page into knowledge is by embedding those words into some kind of internal framework.
The memory diner approach to reading, which I’ve covered in other essays, was designed with meditatio in mind. It uses mnemonics to construct layered memory palaces that separate mental imagery that organizes the contents of a book from mental imagery that captures the ideas of a book.
Once you have a structured mental image of a book, you can easily revisit that book in your mind in order to investigate it or to apply its ideas.
Mnemonics, in my approach, are an intermediary step that connects outside reading, where the book exists outside of your knowledge base, and inside reading, where you’re engaging with the internal representations of what you were able to take away from the book.
The palace building work involves creating a key list during outside reading that captures both the structure of the book and its main ideas, and using that key list to build a memory palace. That memory palace then becomes a place where you can sit with the book and turn it into something more meaningful.
The memory diner is not the goal of reading, but a way to achieve that goal. The goal, of course, changes with each book. Some books you want to master. Some books you want to explore. Other books you want to attack. The one thing that all books have in common, though, is that you need to internalize them in order to act on their contents.
The memory diner would be useless without the act of meditatio.
Why Inside Reading Matters
You have to set time aside for inside reading in order to glean any benefit from the memory palaces you’ve created that store what you’ve read.
Most of your time engaging with a book should be through inside reading. Each minute you spend reading the physical book should either be matched by the time you spend thinking about that book, or dwarfed by it if it’s an important book you want to fully master.
In my own practice, I spend about 5% of my time crafting a memory palace for a book ( that includes drafting my keyword list), 45% of my time on outside reading, and 50% of my time on inside reading, unless it’s a book that’s very important to achieving a goal. In that case, I aim to spend 80% of my time with that book on inside reading.
I should emphasize that I include putting the ideas of a book into practice as part of the “inside reading” process. It’s not just about sitting in an empty room engaging with mental images, but about turning those mental images into real actions when appropriate.
Bumps In The Road
My inside reading practice still needs work.
Our memories decay over time, so you want to ensure that your inside reading sessions are spaced in a way that helps you properly encode the contents of your memory palace. If you wait too long between sessions, your memories might decay, requiring you to revisit the actual book and reread certain things in order to fill in the gaps in your palace.
I’ve had to deal with this over the last six weeks. In January, I had established a routine where I would do “outside” reading in the morning, and “inside” reading at night. This meant I had a dedicated time for revisiting what I had read, and either contemplating its ideas or putting them into practice. Life got messy in February, though, and I stopped doing this for a month, and as a result, my memory practice took a nosedive.
Having a set time and space for inside reading helps a lot, and it does make a big difference in how much value I get from a book. I’ll be giving that habit another try this spring, and hopefully it’ll stick.
Reading In Three Acts
I wrote this essay in order to stress the importance of treating reading as three separate acts: the first act is reading a physical book, the second act is crafting a mental representation of that book, and the third act is engaging with that mental representation in order to internalize the book.
You haven’t really read a book if you haven’t internalized it. All reading involves turning words on a page into internal representations. Mnemonics can help with this, but it’s just one approach among many. The important thing is realizing that a book isn’t just about generating internal representations, but also about engaging those representations.
You don’t have to use my memory diner approach, but you should figure out how you want to engage with what you read, and bring some structure to that process instead of leaving it to chance.
A Final Challenge
The next time you finish a chapter or a book, take the time to see what you can recall, what you can apply, and what you can connect to what you already know.
And remember, reading begins on the page but it ends in the mind. A book is only half-read if you haven’t made it your own.