The inexhaustible spiritual practice of rereading
In a course on contemplative prayer, I assigned just six books—and we read them each twice.
Recently, I heard Minna Zallman Proctor read from her new book of nonfiction short stories—“true stories,” she calls them. During the Q&A, someone asked her about the difference between teaching fiction writing and nonfiction writing. Proctor replied that fiction writers are taught to make their writing more “richly imagined,” while nonfiction writers are taught to make theirs more “richly observed.”
She went on to describe for us an exercise to strengthen both capacities. If you’re trying to describe something happening in a room, she said, you have to send your attention all the way around it. You ask, what does this room look like? What does it smell like? How warm or cool is it? Where do the light and the shadows fall? What’s the feeling in the room, the atmosphere? Who is in the room, and what is in the room, and what is the shape of the space between them?
You send your attention into every corner of the room, beginning in one place and sweeping all the way around. Then you do it again, she said, to discover what you missed the first time. And then you do it again, and again.
