As I write these lines of my final post in this blog series focused on shared reading, I am thinking about a different, shorter line — the epigraph of E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End: “Only connect.” The epigraph is a quote from the novel itself and the primary motivation of its main character, Margaret Wilcox. Margaret questions whether we can connect our often-conflicting inner life (“the passion”) and outer life (“the prose”). She also longs for us to be able to truly connect with one another across our multiple barriers and boundaries.
I think this line comes to mind because it exemplifies the purpose, potential, and practice of shared reading. “Only connect.” People from all walks of life have participated in shared reading groups — lonely seniors, busy executives, those with mental health challenges, people who are incarcerated, those living with cancer, voracious readers, those who hadn’t read a book since school. Regardless of background, what draws most people to the groups is an opportunity to connect. What most experience from participating in the groups is a deeper connection to themselves, to the text, to one another, and to their broader worlds.
German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance is useful in helping us better understand the implications of the connections that happen during shared reading. Resonance occurs when we become intimately attuned to someone or something that alters our being in the world; we feel connected, touched, moved, deeply alive, transformed. Importantly, resonance stems from engagement with the world, something that matters to us (whether knowingly or unknowingly) — standing at the edge of a stormy sea, listening to a plaintive aria, having an infant wrap their hand around your finger. It is not about pleasure, but about how things come to affect us. It is not a feeling, but a relation.
In reading literature, we embark on an unpredictable journey through the human condition and are provided a direct window into the inner thoughts and experiences of others. In connecting with or relating to a situation, a place, a value, an experience, a person in the text, our sense of self and sense of the world can be expanded to accommodate new realities and new possibilities.
Shared reading amplifies the conditions for those involved to experience resonance, to feel that crackle of energy when deeply moved, when deeply connected to ourselves and some ‘other.’ The text — a short story or poem — serves as a collective resource around which relations form as group members spontaneously share their individual responses and also form collective ones. Group members are often left with the sense that they have been moved (by the story, by one another) but also that they have moved another. Through the collective experience of participating in shared reading, our wire to the world can vibrate intensely. In a complicated, noisy world with so much sorrow, it feels urgent that we create more of these spaces to “only connect.” Join me.
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