Participating in the Ascent of the Soul

A Few Random Thoughts on a Well-Read Life

This post started with an accidental picture. To be more accurate, the picture was intentional but the image displaying on my phone’s camera was not. I was reading, looked up something on my phone to verify a definition, and when I clumsily set my phone down on a pile of books nearby, my fingers touched the screen and accidentally activated the camera. The image was what you see in the picture, an upshot of one of my bookshelves. I snapped the picture.

My immediate take was something like the soul’s ascent through books or how reading is like mountain climbing. I decided to search my writing files to see if I had already written something about that or if it was just a serendipitous mental picture. I had not, so I scratched out the following random and undeveloped thoughts, quotes, and observations about a well-read life.

A well-read life is something close to mountain climbing for the soul, where truth, goodness, and beauty are best apprehended and appreciated from the heights of the summit. When reading is understood as participating in the ascent of the soul, then every page is a step, every chapter a ridge, and every book another expansive horizon. Viewed properly, authors then become like Sherpas in one way and inspirational predecessors in another. In either case, their works are left behind for us, serving as waypoints or cairns marking their own journey and pointing the way to higher ground or another path to consider. In the end, however, I suspect the joy will be not in reaching the summit as much as in remembering, reflecting, and rejoicing in the wisdom gained through the climb.

Stop Stealing Dreams

In his interesting manifesto on education, Seth Godin noticed that the typical American high school graduate reads about a book a year on their own (i.e., not counting the ones assigned in college for part of that demographic). However, a large portion of the population reads zero book a year for the rest of their lives. Godin says,

In the connected age, reading and writing remain the two skills that are most likely to pay off with exponential results. Reading leads to more reading. Writing leads to better writing. Better writing leads to a bigger audience and more value creation. And the process repeats. Typical industrial schooling kills reading. Among Americans, the typical high school graduate reads no more that one book a year for fun, and a huge portion of the population reads zero. No books! For the rest of their lives, for 80 years, bookless… But reading is the way we open doors. If our economy and our culture grows based on the exchange of ideas and on the interactions of the informed, it fails when we stop reading.

On this point, he couldn’t be more right. Healthy culture comes from the exchange of ideas and the interactions of the informed. When a society stops reading, human flourishing declines. I would add that a society also declines when it stops reading well—when it stops reading the most important books, the Great Books.

The following statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Economic News Release on June 26, 2025 confirms Godin’s claim:

On an average day, individuals age 75 and over spent 46 minutes reading while those ages 15 to 19 read for 9 minutes. Conversely, individuals ages 15 to 19 spent 1.3 hours playing games or using a computer for leisure on an average day, while those ages 75 and over spent 26 minutes doing so.¹

There are a number of possible inferences that could be made from this report, but one way to think about it is unless you’re over the age of 75, you only need to read more than 10 minutes per day to be an above-average reader in America.

Encouraging? Maybe not.

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Leaders Are Readers

President Truman famously stated, “Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.” While his statement has become cliché, it’s for good reason. It’s tiresomely true. It’s obviously no secret that reading is one of the key habits successful people share. It is essential to the life of the mind and to the development of one’s knowledge base and understanding. And when reading the right books, reading is also the essential ingredient for developing one’s moral imagination.

This excerpt from Business Insider is an example of what I mean, revealing what it calls “the extreme reading habits of … billionaire entrepreneurs:”

• Warren Buffett spends five to six hours a day.

• Bill Gates reads 50 books a year.

• Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks.

• Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day, according to his brother.

• Mark Cuban reads for more than three hours every day.

• Arthur Blank, a co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day.

• Billionaire entrepreneur David Rubenstein reads six books a week.

• Dan Gilbert, the self-made billionaire who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers, reads for one to two hours a day.

As busy as these guys are, their examples leave little room for us to make excuses about our busy lives not affording us the time to read. For strong leaders it seems not reading is not an option. It’s true that great leaders are not always wise, but wise men tend to wield significant influence even if they don’t choose to step into a public leadership role. And one thing that’s been made clear throughout history is that reading participates in the soul’s formation, and a well-read life participates in the soul’s ascent to wisdom.

Three Pre-Modern Thinkers on the Benefits of Reading

I told you these thoughts were random and undeveloped, but you can think of them as a kind of reading charcuterie, what my grandson calls “tray dinners.”

The notable orator and educator, Quintilian (c. 35-100 A. D.) encouraged his pupils to read like they ate—read slowly, digest it, stick closely to authors you trust early on, and read fully and deliberately; don’t just snack. He writes,

Reading, however, is free, and does not hurry past us with the speed of oral delivery; we can reread a passage again and again if we are in doubt about it or wish to fix it in the memory. We must return to what we have read and reconsider it with care, while, just as we do not swallow our food till we have chewed it and reduced it almost to a state of liquefaction to assist the process of digestion, so what we read must not be committed to the memory for subsequent imitation while it is still in a crude state, but must be softened and, if I may use the phrase, reduced to a pulp by frequent re-perusal... For a long time also we should read none save the best authors and such as are least likely to betray our trust in then, while our reading must be almost as thorough as if we were actually transcribing what we read. Nor must we study it merely in parts, but must read through the whole work from cover to cover and then read it afresh, a precept which applies more especially to speeches, whose merits are often deliberately disguised.²

Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141) wrote an entire book on the importance of reading and meditating, how it would benefit us and how to do it properly. In his introduction to The Didascalicon, he writes,

The things by which every man advances in knowledge are principally two—namely, reading and meditation…The start of learning, thus, lies in reading, but its consummation lies in meditation ; which, if any man will learn to love it very intimately and will desire to be engaged very frequently upon it, renders his life pleasant indeed, and provides the greatest consolation to him in his trials. This especially it is which takes the soul away from the noise of earthly business and makes it have even in this life a kind of foretaste of the sweetness of the eternal quiet. And when, through the things which God has made, a man has learned to seek out and to understand him who has made them all, then does he equally instruct his mind with knowledge and fill it with joy. From this it follows that in meditation is to be found the greatest delight.

Then there is John Milton (1608-1674), of Paradise Lost fame, who wrote a tract on free speech criticizing his own Protestant party for censoring the press the way the rival Roman Catholics had been doing. In Areopagitica (p. 1644), he argued for the importance of reading promiscuously (i.e., meaning indiscriminately or at a Whim) as a means of contemplating good and evil and thereby cultivating virtue. Milton writes,

That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental ^(external) whiteness; which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tracts, and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.³

Cultivating a Consistent Reading Habit

I’ve proposed this experiment before, but I thought I’d mention it again because it follows the principle of Creating Incremental Habits.

What would happen if you found a comfortable quiet spot where you won’t be interrupted and set a timer for 25 minutes and just read? Using a pencil to mark things as you read and making annotations in the margins, read actively. When the timer goes off, put the book aside and resume your regular activities. Now what if you did that every day for one week, seven days? You will have invested nearly 3 hours of your leisure time to reading. In 52 weeks, that’s approximately 152 hours.

Let’s just say you complete a book for every ten hours of reading. Of course, it will be more or less depending on the book’s size and genre, but as a sort of gauge to go by, 10 hours to complete a 200-page book is rather generous. That would amount to reading 15 books in a year.

Unless you’re already reading more than 15 books per year, you will likely recognize the potential this experiment has to transform your reading life; unfortunately, only a few will attempt the experiment, and fewer will actually complete it. But I think better things of you.

1. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf

2. Quintilian, With An English Translation, ed. Harold Edgeworth Butler, Institutio Oratoria (English) (Medford, MA: Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd., 1922), 13, 15.

3. John Milton, “Areopagitica,” in The Harvard Classics 3: Essays by Bacon, Milton, and Browne, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1909), 212–213.