Why Read Together

“After what we have said, a discussion of friendship would naturally follow, since it is a virtue or implies virtue, and is besides most necessary with a view to living. For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; even rich men and those in possession of office and of dominating power are thought to need friends most of all.” — Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Friendship, Aristotle argues, is not a hobby and not a luxury; it is a condition for the good life. And it does not arrive on its own. It is built from particular things — shared time, shared attention, the willingness to be in the same room as someone else — and it does not survive the absence of those things, no matter how often we tell ourselves it might.

It is late summer, 1997. GoldenEye 007 has just been released on the Nintendo 64 and is already a cultural event. Storyline and graphics aside, the best part is the multiplayer mode — four kids around a single television, splitting the screen, choosing to be in the same room at the same time, accusations of screen-peeking, mock outrage at every kill, the kind of friendship that doesn’t quiet down. Other games would refine what GoldenEye did — I see you, Halo — but the principle had already been set. I call it the GoldenEye Principle: presence is the point.

A video game ends. A meal ends. A book and a good conversation refuse to be over for weeks. That patience is the discipline, and the discipline is what does the work. Reading the same difficult text slowly, with the same people, gives a friendship something it cannot get from any shorter form. The book becomes a third party at the table: slow enough to require sustained attention, demanding enough to require each other, present long enough that a real conversation has time to unfold and mean something.

Friendship, Aristotle’s kind, takes the kind of time most modern life refuses to give it. A book asks for that time back. That is what we are doing here.