История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 140 стр.

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So, it is impossible to completely analyze what we do when we read. We are

still far from the answer. Mysteriously, we continue to read without a satisfactory

definition of what it is we are doing.

THE SILENT READERS.

In AD 384, almost half a century after Constantine the Great, first emperor

of the Christian world, was baptized on his death-bed, a twenty-nine-year-old

professor of Latin rhetoric whom future centuries would know as Saint Augustine

arrived in Rome from one of the empire’s outposts in North Africa. He rented a

house, set up a school and attracted a number of students who had heard about the

qualities of this provincial intellectual, but it wasn’t long before it became clear to

him that he wasn’t going to be able to earn his living as a teacher in the imperial

capital.

So when, a year later, the Prefect of Rome offered him the opportunity of

teaching literature in the city of Milan, and included travelling expenses in the

offer, Augustine accepted gratefully.

Perhaps because he was a stranger to the city and wanted intellectual

company, in Milan Augustine paid a visit to the city’s bishop, the celebrated

Ambrose. Ambrose (who, like Augustine, was later to be canonized) was a man in

his late forties, strict in his orthodox beliefs and unafraid of even the highest

earthly powers.

Ambrose was an extraordinary reader. “When he read,” said Augustine, “his

eyes scanned the page and his heart sought out the meaning, but his voice was

silent and his tongue was still. Anyone could approach him freely and guests were

not commonly announced, so that often, when we came to visit him, we found him

reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.”

To Augustine such reading manners seemed sufficiently strange. The

implication is that this method of reading, this silent perusing of the page, was in

his time something out of the ordinary, and that normal reading was performed out