Reading and Its Archetypes
When people read, they do so as one of two reading Archetypes: the Downloader or the Experiencer. Whichever they choose defines why, how, and what they read.
Downloaders read to acquire. They see books, first and foremost, as lectures, as optical information streams, from which to install new skills, knowledge, or wisdom. Furthermore, they believe that the primary benefit of writing as a technology lies in its ability to transfer these things. Accordingly, they value remembering and dread forgetting, and the ratio of the former over the latter determines the value they derive from reading. This gives the Downloader a unique Achilles' Heel: reading can result in failure. Investing time in an activity only to fail frightens them, so their habits all center on avoiding it. Reading, then, transforms into studying: they draft book lists like a curriculum, take notes and make flashcards, and optimize their reading environment for absorption. The Downloader tells you he reads for pleasure, but it usually creates in him a point of stress. He progresses through a book with a conquistador's satisfaction, and dares not embark on a book unless it promises sufficient plunder; he reads only what promises new truths, and never what might mislead or what offers what he already has.
Experiencers, on the other hand, have the opposite disposition: they read not to acquire, but to feel. They read to indulge in the palpitations of romance, the buoyancy of joy, the shade of melancholy—to make fleeting imprints on the soul rather than stuff the mind. I call them fleeting because humans don't keep an inventory of emotions from which they can retrieve or reuse as they do skills, knowledge, and wisdom. This means feeling an emotion fully again requires that we recreate it anew, from scratch, which shapes the Experiencer's chief aim: to completely rebirth emotions at their highest fidelity. Experiencers, therefore, don't value remembering, nor do they dread forgetting. Emerson phrased their disposition best: "I cannot remember the books I have read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Experiencers do not take notes. Experiencers do not optimize. Rather, they have freedom to read when and however strikes them as enjoyable. Of a book, they value immersion, and how well a story mimics real human behavior. The best books force tears and inspire goosebumps and make them laugh aloud like lunatics. They read what their mercurial human heart desires, and reread books to experience them again without hesitancy.
But a third, far less common archetype exists, one that deserves more adoption—the Vagabond. A Vagabond's purpose in reading diverges from both Downloaders and Experiencers singularly: he reads not for the book's promise, like a feeling, skill, or specific knowledge, but for the incidental thoughts a book inspires. External stimuli constantly introduce turbulence into our stirring thoughts. Sights do this. Sounds do this. The ideas in the very books we read do this. To the end-goal readers, this turbulence serves only as an errant distraction, a sloshing annoyance in the mind’s cauldron that prevents them from reaching the book’s finish line. And so the moment they spot the tiniest swirl—the slightest detouring thought—threatening to build into a destabilizing turbulence, they hastily quell it to maintain their mind’s equanimity. But the Vagabond considers this foolish, for he recognizes that all invention, beauty, wisdom, and truth start as one of these seemingly senseless swirls, and that whether they reach their crowning form depends on whether we welcome their turbulence. He cares not for where a book destines him. He reads only to stir the pot.