Two decades ago, when I first joined the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, we allowed our cell phones to die. There was no signal. We were slipping off the grid.
That sense of immersion felt almost tactile. There was nowhere else I was supposed to be. It still feels that way, pleasantly refreshing, yet I miss the completeness of the off-radar experience.
Around the same period, I was finishing an MFA at Bennington College. In the evenings, professors and visiting writers delivered readings. During winter residencies they read and lectured in VAPA, a space that was stark and somehow architecturally intimate. Securing a seat carried a certain tension. I cannot overstate how it felt as if something hung in the balance during those evening readings, and how I listened with extraordinary intensity. I was astonished by how much art, life, and knowledge flowed through these writers.
As a student, I longed to publish solid books. Yet I also yearned to possess what creates a good book—a sharpened, attentive mind.
I know it is perilous to romanticize the past, especially one’s own coming-of-age. People were still deeply distracted twenty years ago. We squandered time. We avoided challenging books. And I have spent much of my adult life guiding young writers whose seriousness and curiosity humble me.
But I have also observed—felt—my own attention shift. I read less. My attention seems fractal, constantly radiating toward other directions. More and more, it feels as though we live near vast stores of knowledge without necessarily carrying that knowledge inside us.
Recently, my friend Rebecca Schinsky and I were talking about Zora Neale Hurston, and then Steinbeck, and somehow our discussion wandered to what we started calling “analog minds”: minds formed before our current condition of ceaseless access and interruption. Minds nourished in a different way. Minds that spent decades absorbing books, music, scripture, poems, names of plants, stories told by others, and in turn made art that could be imitated and learned from.
When I think of analog minds, I picture the environmental writer and longtime Middlebury professor John Elder, whom I invited to speak in my “Landscape and Memory” advanced nonfiction course. He delivered a remarkable lecture with effortless elegance, gliding between philosophy, literature, ecology, and Chinese poetry. He introduced us to the notion of “tact” and the idea of staying in “contact” with other people and their ideas. The class was spellbound, then transformed.
John’s references weren’t ornamental. He wasn’t merely displaying his knowledge. The books seemed to live there for him, readily available, with one idea touching another.
I recall watching him teach and experiencing a disquieting thought: This feels out of reach. It’s the same feeling I used to have every term teaching Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, when I had to admit that I hadn’t learned or paid attention with nearly the same depth. Ideas weren’t accumulating and composting inside me the way they might have in a different era.
Months later, when filmmaker Corey Hendrickson and I were filming John and his wife Rita, and discussing their reading routine, we confronted the accumulated richness of lives devoted to nurturing the mind. There were no shortcuts, and no search engine could yield the end result. John and Rita had built their inner worlds slowly, across decades, through what they chose to read and reread, listen to, learn, practice, and remember. Their individual lives seemed richer for it, and this later chapter of their togetherness did, too.
Creating the film compelled me to rethink what a syllabus can be.
We generally encounter a syllabus when we are young. Someone older decides what should fill our minds. Here are the books. Here are the questions. Here is the sequence in which we will encounter them. For a few months, someone else takes responsibility for guiding our attention. Eventually, we must take on that responsibility ourselves.
What will I read? What ideas will I inhabit beside? Which voices will I return to? What deserves rereading? What will I memorize? What will allow itself to change me?
John travels widely, though today his physical world is anchored in Vermont. Even as he and Rita spend their days in a carefully designed home, their inner landscape extends far beyond: through poetry and theology, natural history and literature, crossing centuries and continents. Deep reading appears to have fostered a distinctive kind of associative richness. A bird can summon a poem. A mountain can trigger a remembered passage. Grief can illuminate something read forty years earlier.
We tend to think of reading as a means of acquiring knowledge. Listening to John made me realize that a lifetime of reading can leave us accompanied by the world itself.
Perhaps this is what I miss when I recall those early Bread Loaf mornings or a Bennington reading: not a dawn before smartphones, exactly, but the sense that my attention belonged entirely to me, and that what I did with it mattered. I could choose what entered my mind. I could linger with something long enough for it to become part of me.
A syllabus, in that sense, is a declaration of faith in ideas and their power to alter and deepen lives. I present John Elder’s as a guiding example, and in the film, a window into his life with Rita as a deliberate practice, a life and partnership animated by good books.
*
John Elder’s Reading Life: A Syllabus
For John Elder, reading is not merely a private intellectual pursuit. It is a daily discipline shared with his wife, Rita, a return to books that have stood by him for decades, and a way of moving among literature, scripture, philosophy, poetry, conversation, and music.
“Rita’s discerning listening and our lengthy conversations about what we’ve just heard together,” Elder says of their daily ritual of reading aloud, “make this activity a central part of our everyday life.”
Here are some of the books and authors that currently fill that life.
John and Rita’s most recent read-aloud selections include:
• Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say
• Ann Patchett, Whistler
• Virginia Evans, The Correspondent
• Maggie O’Farrell, Land
• Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain
Among these, John notes that The Things We Never Say, Whistler, and Land impacted them most profoundly. At this stage, John performs the reading aloud while Rita listens, and their afterward discussions carry the reading forward. The ritual has become, in his words, “an essential fact of every day for us.”
The books deserving a three-month residence:
Every year, John and Rita dedicate most of three months to revisiting a single, monumental novel. Their two most recent selections were:
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
The aim isn’t merely to finish these works but to inhabit them again, slowly and together.
Returning to the Bible:
After completing online Bible courses led by Marilynne Robinson, John has begun revisiting the King James Bible—the text that shaped his Southern Baptist upbringing.
It’s a distinctively thoughtful kind of rereading, he notes—returning to childhood texts in adulthood, now carrying with them decades of other reading and life experience.
Philosophy and spiritual practice:
John is also exploring Buddhist writers, especially Stephen Batchelor, alongside classic Western philosophy, with a particular fascination for Stoicism.
These books form another thread in his reading life: literature as a practice for contemplating how to live.
Du Fu, Li Bai, and the ritual of memorization:
John continues to work deliberately with the Chinese poets Du Fu and Li Bai. This practice is now linked to another daily routine: playing the uilleann pipes.
“Playing the uilleann pipes every day feels similar to reading and memorizing poetry,” he writes, “especially the poetry of Du Fu.”
