The Long View Letters
Issue 01 (April 19, 2026)
On Rereading:
(And Why I'm Still on Volume IV of IX)
Here is the truth: I am a writer who has often struggled with a reading habit.
Picking a new book, keeping up with bestseller lists (let alone book clubs), and setting reading challenges has felt incredibly hard.
Perhaps part of it is down to how I feel about reading itself.
I grew up in India, where the education system emphasized learning by rote. We had to memorize quadratic equations, Sanskrit couplets, articles of the constitution, and the length of the country’s coastline. Reading was a mnemonic feat.
Then I read Winston Churchill’s criticism in his essay, ‘Painting as a Pastime.’ He writes:
"I once met a man who told me he had read all the books that mattered. Cross-questioned, he appeared to have read a great many, but they seemed to have made only a slight impression. How many had he understood? How many had entered into his mental composition? How many had been hammered on the anvils of his mind and afterwards ranged in an armoury of bright weapons ready to hand?"
Once we demilitarize Churchill's metaphors, it is clear that for him, reading was serious business. Every piece of truth and beauty one could gather from a book had to be not only organized but deployable. I accepted it. Except for where he saw it as an outward-facing act. He made reading sound like it was a power equation we entered into with others.
As it turned out, this theory was lifted off its hinges during university. The faculty impressed upon us that writers had to work like carpenters – familiarizing themselves with turns of sentences, points of plot, and nuances of character. Each text was a block of wood – and I, who desired to be a good carpenter, had to know it by the grain.
The reading stakes, centered on the status of the text, became higher than ever. I had to read widely. But also, deeply. In a limited time.
What I wanted to do was walk from century to century, taking a survey of the landscape. But here I was living in a time when approximately 2 - 4 million books are published in English each year. It made me feel like I’d been pushed onboard a bullet train that was hurtling across tectonic plates in motion.
And, thanks to the principle of relative velocity, I felt frozen.
Soon I started working at an online magazine. The long workday, with its demands of SEO and GEO, meant I had less time and less will to read than ever before.
So, what I committed to was rereading.
Prominent in this syllabus were the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda - nine hardbound volumes I had bought years ago, after first chancing on excerpts from his speeches as a teenager. Swami Vivekananda was an Indian monk who attended the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. Today, he is widely credited with introducing yoga to the West.
I had begun reading and rereading his lectures and letters since my late teens. The practice had continued intermittently. I would wander off and return - like a toddler to a feeding plate.
Now, I made this rereading a workday ritual.
Hanging on for dear life to the Delhi metro’s guardrails, I would read on my phone's 6-inch screen. Here I was, surrounded by the din of conversations, headphone music, and hassled women in an exclusive ladies’ compartment, entering into an act of communion.
By now the landscape of his letters had become familiar. I looked forward to beloved elements - like this letter he wrote in 1894, from Swampscott, Massachusetts to his adoptive American sisters. In it, he complains that Mary and Harriet Hale have taught him bad French: “What nonsense was the song Harriet taught me “dans la plaine” - the deuce take it. I told it to a French scholar and he laughed and laughed till the fellow was well-nigh burst at my wonderful translation.”
Although they are fascinating cultural documents, my interest in his letters and lectures, wasn't intellectual. It was relational. His works had become like landscapes of childhood, where former selves still lingered.
That said, the benefits were more than just pangs of nostalgia.
As C.S. Lewis once said: “An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . .We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. Till then, it is like wasting great wine on a ravenous natural thirst which merely wants cold wetness.”
It is this idea: of savouring the real beauties of a book, that has often pulled me back to a text again and again. Whenever I start to feel behind seeing the BookToks and Goodreads of the world, I think of the Indian Hive Bee (Apis Cerana Indica). A smaller bee found in the higher altitudes of the Himalayas, it forages within a concentrated radius. And, I’m assuming, this means that it returns to familiar plants like the rhododendron, the wild rose, and thyme over and over again. The honey it produces is valued in Ayurvedic traditions.
Swami Vivekananda is a historical figure. He lived more than a century before my time. But returning to his works, which are non-fiction, has made the life behind the letters as vivid as if it belonged to a beloved fictional protagonist. Over time, I came to feel not just reverence for the monk that the American press had labeled, 'The Cyclonic Hindu' but also deep empathy for the young 30-something man who shivered through the night in a Chicago train station because he did not have the right clothes for the climate. I felt for the young man in a turban who was followed by laughing crowds simply because he looked different.
The truth is, reading is not a shortcut to empathy. There is an incubation period during which reading builds us by way of vocabularies or sensitivities. The studies that claim that reading fiction builds empathy add a qualifier we often miss - “over time.”
I imagine very few of us, if any, read Oliver Twist one day and volunteer at a soup kitchen on the next. If I were to reframe reading as a chemical reaction, perhaps it might look like:
Text x Time = SelfΔ
Engaging with a text over time - whether through repetition, or slowness, is likely to generate new ways of seeing and being.
As an example, when I now read Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day, I’m no longer someone looking to escape this city. Instead, having become the person who goes on guided walks to see the city, I am held in thrall by Desai's depiction of Delhi through the decades. Time has rendered the city both deeply familiar and partly inaccessible. The novel and I explore these boundaries together.
Finally, there still remains the question of reading as education. But rather than directing it at the world, like Churchill believed, or at the text like universities do, it has taken on a more internal dimension for me. In Sanskrit, the word for reading is ‘swa-dhyaya’ “self-reading.” When we return to a text, we also return to a self. We become conscious not just of what it is we are reading, but who it is that reads.
What a profound gift in a world that would have us scroll our senses away.
With the works of Swami Vivekananda, I have changed from the teenager who read greedily to the adult who reads slowly. She wanted to learn by rote, to possess, to find a magical key that opened the door to a sure, stable knowing of the world, one that would never betray her. Today, as I stick tabs on the battered pages of Lectures from Colombo to Almora (Vol IV of IX), I am reflecting not just on the text, but on the selves that have pored over it.
I begin to trust that knowing the self is at least as important as knowing the world.
And to suspect that it might be more so.
Warmly,
Skendha
The Long View Letters
P.S. The Long View Letters explore how we can move slowly in a world no longer designed for it. And why it might be worthwhile to do so. To honour that pace, these letters arrive fortnightly:
- The Essay: A deep dive into a single idea.
- The Miscellany: A curated list of reflections and discoveries that make the world sparkle.
If these words stir you, please write back. I'd love to hear if you have any books you return to. And I will read every reply <3
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