Megan Mayhew Bergman on John Elder's Reading Life

Twenty years ago, writers at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont let their cell phones die. Megan Mayhew Bergman was one of them, and she remembers the immersion as almost physical.

"There was nowhere else I was supposed to be," Bergman writes in a new essay on the environmental writer and longtime Middlebury professor John Elder. "It still feels that way, refreshingly so, but I miss the completeness of the off-radar version."

Bergman's essay, published as a reflection on attention and a life built by reading, opens in her own past. She was completing an MFA at Bennington College. Faculty and visiting writers read and lectured in VAPA, a stark, intimate space where finding a seat felt tense. She wanted, she writes, not only to publish good books but "to possess what produces a good book — a good mind."

She resists nostalgia. People were distracted twenty years ago too, she concedes; she has spent much of her adult life teaching young writers whose seriousness humbles her. Yet her own attention, she writes, now feels "fractal, constantly radiating in other directions."

What is an 'analog mind'?

In conversation with Rebecca Schinsky — a talk that ranged from Zora Neale Hurston to Steinbeck — Bergman arrived at a phrase: "analog minds." These are minds formed before constant access and interruption, nourished by decades of books, music, scripture, poems, plant names and other people's stories, then made into "idiosyncratic and imitable art."

Elder is her prime example. Invited to speak during her "Landscape and Memory" advanced non-fiction course, he lectured with "casual elegance," moving between philosophy, literature, ecology and Chinese poetry. His references were not ornamental. "The books seemed simply to live there, available to him, one idea touching another," Bergman writes.

Watching him teach, she admits an uncomfortable thought: "This feels out of reach."

Months later, Bergman and filmmaker Corey Hendrickson filmed Elder and his wife, Rita, at home. There was no shortcut, she writes; no search engine could produce the end effect. The couple had built their interior worlds slowly, over decades, through what they chose to read, reread, hear, memorize and practice.

A syllabus, Bergman argues, is normally something we encounter young — someone older deciding what enters our minds. Eventually we must write our own. "What will I read? What ideas will I live beside? Which voices will I return to? What deserves rereading? What will I memorize? What will I allow to alter me?"

Deep reading, she observes, created in Elder an associative richness: a bird calls up a poem; a mountain, a remembered passage; grief illuminates something read forty years before. "A lifetime of reading leaves us accompanied," she writes.

What does John Elder actually read?

Elder's practice is shared, not solitary. He reads aloud to Rita daily, and their conversations follow. "Rita's discerning listening and our lengthy conversations about what we've just heard together," Elder says, "makes this activity an essential fact of every day for us."

Their recent read-alouds include:

• Elizabeth Strout, The Things We Never Say
• Ann Patchett, Whistler
• Virginia Evans, The Correspondent
• Maggie O'Farrell, Land
• Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

Of these, The Things We Never Say, Whistler and Land affected them most powerfully.

Each year the couple also devotes the better part of three months to rereading a monumental novel. Their recent choices: George Eliot's Middlemarch, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. The point, Bergman writes, is not to finish but to live inside them again, slowly, together.

After taking online Bible courses taught by Marilynne Robinson, Elder has returned to books of the King James Bible that "presided over my Southern Baptist upbringing." He reads the Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor alongside classical Western philosophy, with a special interest in Stoicism. He works deliberately on the Chinese poets Du Fu and Li Bai, a practice intertwined with playing the uilleann pipes.

"Playing the uilleann pipes daily feels akin to reading and memorizing poetry," he writes, "especially that of Du Fu."

Bergman's closing claim is quiet but pointed: a syllabus is an expression of faith in ideas and their power to alter lives — and Elder's, she argues, is instructive.