On Reading

For most of our history, reading has been done by just a few specialists, and aloud. In the fifth century, Saint Augustine was famously perplexed by the weird habits of Saint Ambrose: "When he read, 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."