The Lost Art of Research as Leisure

Where have the amateur researchers gone, and how do we bring them back?

The Literary Foundations of Civilisation

Nestled in a café-bar-museum-event space in Fort Mason — San Francisco’s water-front, weathered military campus with sweeping views of the Golden Gate Bridge —is a floor to ceiling library housing the Long Now Foundation’s Manual for Civilisation. A crowd-curated collection of the 3,500 books “most essential to sustain or rebuild a civilisation,” the Manual for Civilisation began with one question: If you were stranded on an island (or small hostile planetoid), what books would you want to have with you?

The collection, displayed along industrial walls, is both solemn and optimistic, earnest and futile, a romantic’s bookish Golden Record. It is, most vividly, a humbling monument to historian Barbara Tuchman’s proclamation that “Books are the carriers of civilisation.” “Without books,” Tuchman wrote, “the development of civilisation would have been impossible.”

Linking civilisation and human culture to books, reading and writing is not unique to Tuchman.

Writing nearly 350 years earlier, Galileo had declared books “the seal of all the admirable inventions of mankind,” because books allow us to communicate through time and place, and to speak to those “who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years.”

A few generations later, Henry David Thoreau, writing in the seclusion of Walden Pond, wrote that “books are the treasured wealth of the field and the fit inheritance of generations and culture.”

The following generation, Carl Sagan, after taking his TV audience on a journey through the cosmos, found himself alone in a library, circling back to Galileo. With the Cavatina — one of two Beethoven songs floating in space on the Voyager II’s Golden Record — playing, Sagan marvelled at the existence of books. “Writing,” he says, “is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs.” “A book,” he concludes, “is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Tuchman’s platitude, then, has persisted through the centuries: Books carry civilisation. Not because they are inherently sacred objects of inherently sacred knowledge, but because reading and writing assemble and shape culture. And without culture, there is no civilisation.

The Divine Command to Read

In Arabic, the root word for civilisation — ح-ض-ر: to be present, to settle, to remain — expresses a profound shift from wandering to dwelling. For Islam, that shift began with a search at the boundary between city and desert.

1,450 years ago, looking down at the Kaaba from 2,000 feet up, and over two miles away, a wanderer in search of a spiritual dwelling was commanded to Read. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ responded, “I am not a reader.” He was commanded again, Read. Again the Holy Prophet responded, “I am not a reader.” The command came once more. Read in the Name of your Lord who created.

So much has been said about Islam’s origin story — codified through humanity’s most rigorous and sophisticated system of oral preservation — that one hesitates to reference it in an essay about reading. Yet, it is with this divine command that the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus began the story of Islamic civilisation. Read in the Name of your Lord who created.

Between Solitude and Community

To command an unlettered man to Read unsettles the essential pillar that reading is largely, or exclusively, the one dimensional act of decoding printed symbols. The Arabic word, “Iqra,” often translated as to “read” contains a curious ambiguity — it simultaneously means “to read” and “to recite.” To recite is to engage in a primarily oral act, externally expressive. To read is to engage in something more private and solitary, internally reflective.

The Read of Islam’s originating verse embodies, as Alan Jacobs succinctly puts it in Pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distractions, “a moving between the solitary encounter and something more social.” In the context of modern reading, social can be anything — a journal entry, a blog post, a book club, a literary salon, a dignified virtual debate, a letter to a friend — because, Jacobs writes, “every good idea ever achieved is the product of both connection and contemplation, of moving back and forth between the two.”

If reading does not flow outward to build and contribute to the living networks of human knowledge, the divine command to Read feels hamstrung, unfulfilled.

Reading alone however — even with its duality — is not enough. The Quran’s command to read has a direction.

Read in the Name of Your Lord who Created. Created humans from a clinging clot. Read! And your Lord is the Most Generous, Who taught by the pen—taught humanity what they knew not.

The command to Read in the name of our Creator confers — as Rebecca Elson put in “We Astronomers,” a poem about resisting disenchantment — a “responsibility to awe.” The Quranic Read could be interpreted as a responsibility to awe. It is an invitation to learn with both disciplined inquiry, and receptive wonder.

The Long Century of the Last Reader

Over the last century, our responsibility to awe has been a source of anxiety.

In 1926 — the year the radio, a dizzying new addition to the American home, brought the World Series to living rooms across the country; the year Bell Telephone perfected transcontinental calls from New York to San Francisco for $18; the year the Orpheum Theatre opened in Los Angeles, its legendary neon sign still shining today—Virginia Woolf worried about the future of reading.

In the August 3, 1926 edition of The New Republic, Woolf, comparing cinema to reading, is unsettled and nearly disgusted by the horror of the cinema. The cinema, she writes, and the pleasure we derive from it, emanates from an impulse so unrefined in its humanity, it is anti-civilisational. Woolf, the quintessential sombre optimist who famously wrote that “the future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think” in January 1915, does not go so far as to condemn the future of reading, but she concludes the audio-visual dangerously erodes depth.

25 years later, in 1951 — the year I Love Lucy debuted, replacing the family radio with a wooden TV box set; the year of House Un-American Activities Committee; the year of the first nuclear tests in the Nevada desert; the last year before the death of technicolour in 1952 — E.B. White, beloved children’s book author of Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, worries about the future of reading.

In the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” White reflected on the Rollins College President’s prediction that “in fifty years, only five percent of the people in the country will be reading. White writes, “to us, it would seem that even if only one person out of a hundred and fifty million should continue as a reader, he would be the one worth saving, the nuclear around which to found a university. This ‘impossible person,” this “Last Reader,” is the “queen bee,” from whom a “new race of men, linked perfectly with the long past by the broken chain of their intellect, to carry on the community.” He concludes that it is more likely the race will perpetuate “through audiovisual devices, which ask no discipline of the mind, and which are already giving the room the languor of an opium parlor.”

45 years later, in 1996 — the year Fox News launched on satellite television; the year Dolly was cloned; the year of the “miniature telephone”; of dial-up, the “mouse” and “keyboard”, “www” and “@”; the last year before Amazon would change the Internet — Susan Sontag worries about the future of reading.

In a letter to Jorge Luis Borges ten years after his death, Sontag apologised to her old friend: “I’m sorry to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species.” By books, she means not the book itself, but “the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects.” Soon, “we will call up on ‘bookscreens’ any ‘text’ on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, ‘interact’ with it.” Sontag’s conclusion threads White and Woolf’s fears of decades past, “when books become ‘texts’ that we ‘interact’ with…the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality.” It will mean, she declares, not only the death of the book, but “nothing less than the death of inwardness.”

For nearly 100 years — each year, the future arriving faster than we have been able to process it — we have worried about the future of reading. Yet, none of these writers, nor Harold Bloom in How to Read and Why, nor Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren in How to Read a Book, nor Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death, predicted the future that arrived: an uncanny valley, neither in “orality” nor “literacy”—surrounded by more books, more words, more reading and writing than perhaps at any time in history, yet lacking a coherent culture.

Woolf, White and Sontag foresaw the corrosive, savage effect of the “audio-visual” on the human brain and soul. They did not worry about the disappearance of books, but about the cultural collapse that would occur when reading shifts from an immersive, contemplative act to something passive, fragmented and superficial. The death of reading was not a loss of books, but a loss of culture.

A Culture In Crisis

These fears have not been unfounded. Today, we find ourselves in precisely the cultural crisis that Woolf, White, and Sontag anticipated—not a world without books, but a world where fragmented attention and superficial engagement have eroded the foundations of shared meaning and cultural coherence.

The definition of “culture” is as liquid as the phenomenon it seeks to describe. In Princes and Powers, James Baldwin observes that only a culture in crisis would ask for a definition of “culture.”

We are a culture in crisis. We lack, as Byung-Chul Han articulates in The Disappearance of Rituals, the structures and forms that make meaning possible, leading to cultural fragmentation. The result is a sense of civilisational ADHD. A generational restlessness, inattentiveness, and excessive movement in no direction, with insight elusive and ephemeral.

Research as Leisure: Eliot and Pieper on Cultural Recovery

For T.S. Eliot, writing in post-World War II England, “culture” is a mutually dependent hierarchy of three “senses”— the individual, the group, and society — that manifest in creating “the pattern of society as a whole.” With the fragmentation of any one sense from the other - the individual from the group, the group from society — “higher civilisation is unlikely to be found.”

In this fragmented landscape, we need not just diagnoses but prescriptions. How might we rebuild the foundations of culture when our very modes of attention have been compromised? The answer may lie in recovering an ancient understanding of leisure—not as idleness, but as a form of directed contemplation.

Josef Piper, writing at the same time as Eliot, but in a defeated and fragmented Germany, declares leisure the basis of culture. By “leisure,” Pieper does not mean idleness, but the more ancient type of leisure — leisure as the Greek σχολή (scholē), or school.

Pieper’s leisure is a contemplative one—it is, in essence, a style of unconstrained research. Such leisure is not merely, or singularly, the pursuit of knowledge “for its own sake,” nor is it simply “reading for pleasure.” The leisure that forms the basis of culture is a directed and intentional curiosity — it is the practice of formulating questions and seeking answers with a disposition towards wonder, not rigid certainty. Where free time is not used for research — for developing questions, and investigating the answers with an explorer’s spirit — cultural coherence crumbles. For Pieper, without leisure as letters, or “research as leisure,” there is no pattern from which higher civilisation is found.

Taken together, Eliot and Pieper offer complementary architectures of culture: Eliot describes the external pattern of culture, while Pieper describes the internal condition—leisure—that nourishes and regenerates that pattern. Without the structural coherence Eliot describes, culture risks disintegration; without the contemplative leisure Pieper champions, that structure is hollowed.

Leisure as letters recasts reading and writing as fundamentally playful and yet, deliberate activities. Leisure as letters formalises wonder, curiosity, and the joy of discovery. It is the “basis” of culture because, through the exchange of ideas — with writers alive today and writers alive a thousand years ago — the “pattern of society” is assembled, and reassembled.

Looking into the abyss of the uncanny valley, leisure as letters unlocks a new cultural imagination. The formal but playful exchange of ideas, driven by intentional curiosity, creates a new culture.

Against Hollow Reading

What does cultural recovery look like in practice? Assembling the pattern of society as a whole begins with a shift in perspective: seeing reading, and inquiry, not as a burdensome or academically cloistered act, but as an act of playful and intentional curiosity.

For some, the compulsion to read manifests as a productivity hack, or as the passive consumption of viral self-help books and novels. These readers treat reading not as a tool to discern the reality around them, but as an obligation to signal productive virtue or as mere entertainment, no different from a reality TV show.

For others, many of whom are voracious readers, the compulsion to read manifests as an exercise in confirmation bias: collecting fragments of ideas that validate existing worldview. These readers treat reading not as an invitation to increased depth, but as an opportunity to superficially appropriate concepts that comfortably align with their existing beliefs. The result is an intellectual ventriloquism that stunts curiosity.

Against these hollow forms of reading stands research as leisure: an honorable response to a divine command to read in the Name of the Creator. It invites us to look at all which makes up life with purpose and curiosity, to seek knowledge as an open-ended, reverent engagement with mystery. It is, most simply, to be a student, even as we clock in and out of our ‘knowledge economy’ jobs, even as we lack the protection and prescriptive shepherding of the academy.

For the academy, “research” is a term of art. For our purposes, research is not a rarefied academic exercise. It is a fundamentally human activity, an adventure, a craft, a conviviality that assembles culture.

Non-experts can, and should, aspire to expertise.

From Theory to Practice: A Framework for Research as Leisure

1. Cultivate Curiosity

Having the library of Alexandria in our pockets has dulled, rather than heightened, our senses. Despite unprecedented access to information, there is a sluggish incuriosity, a giving of the self to the algorithm that feeds us information, rather than allows us to search for it.

Yet curiosity, at its core, is simple: it is observation, attention, and the persistent asking of why, and how. Curiosity is to stand before the Creator in quiet submission that within each question is a universe of more questions.

Cultivating curiosity is as simple as picking up a magazine, coming across an essay on bird migration and wanting to learn more. It is as simple as taking a walk, noticing the sidewalk or street beneath you, the buildings, trees, plant and animal life around you, and wondering how and why it all got there.

It was during my own walks that I began to question the suburban landscape around me: How did these houses get built, why these houses, and why this style, why are the streets so wide? How did this neighborhood come to be? What I initially saw as a monotonous sprawl became a mysterious puzzle, an adventure in understanding how urban planning, architecture, land use, economics and technology touched my life.

2. Develop a Question

Curiosity without direction is mere distraction. For our purposes, curiosity must crystallise into a question. Passive curiosity must be transformed into an active search for truth. For the leisurely researcher, developing a question is fun because it is anti-disciplinary, multidisciplinary and free to flourish without the arcane rules of the academy.

No question is stupid, but most questions are bad, which is not in itself bad. That a question is bad is a delightful part of the process because it allows for thoughts and connections to bloom over time. A bad question is still a starting point.

My own questions about the suburbs were bad — broad, vague, sprawling. My anchor question “how did the suburbs come to be?” became “how did zoning create the modern suburbs?” and from there, “what is the history of zoning?” to “how did the mall create the modern suburbs?” to “why are there parking minimums” and “are the suburbs actually rational?” and on and on and on.

With practice, I learned a simple formula: A good question is specific enough to guide research, but open enough to allow for discovery. Discovery is essential for the blossoming of thoughts because it is where multidisciplinarity, connections and new questions emerge.

3. Gather Evidence

Once a question takes shape, it needs substance to grow. Gathering evidence is where most researchers get stuck.

First, our information ecosystem has created collectors, rather than readers, out of us. Collecting PDFs, books, and lists of books is a uniquely thrilling pleasure but it can hamstring us. The most challenging part of gathering evidence is organising it.

Second, for the leisurely researcher, self-study must include the discipline’s foundational texts. Understanding those texts, and how they’ve shaped what we think the subject, is crucial because it is where a healthy dose of disagreeableness and scepticism can thrive. By understanding the rules that govern a discipline’s thinking, the leisurely researcher is empowered to thoughtfully question them, explore paths conventional wisdom has overlooked, and develop new answers.

Finally, there is always more to read. That’s ok.

4. Develop an Answer

Research has to culminate, even if its culmination is more questions to research. The culmination does not have to be ground-breaking, but it does have to exist. A resolution must materialise in tangible form, as an essay, a video, a social media thread, or even a letter to a friend.

What distinguishes research as leisure from idle browsing is precisely this movement toward creation. However modest, your answer must contribute to the conversation rather than merely consuming or repeating what others have said.

5. Community of Knowledge

Ideally, like the duality of the Quran’s Read, the culmination of research is social, conversational and communal. Fundamental to the art of research as leisure is the creation of formal and informal ‘communities of knowledge’ in which well-researched ideas are communicated in a written form, and presented for wider debate.

Today, these communities are everywhere. Substack, YouTube, Discord, Twitter. They exist in small-scale book clubs, writing circles, and informal discussion groups that meet in living rooms and coffee shops across the world. Through these communities, much like the Bloomsbury Group, the Inklings, Gertrude Stein’s Salon, or the Vienna Circle, we nurture the living networks through which ideas are tested, refined, cross-pollinated, and passed along.

In doing so, we gradually reassemble the pattern of society as a whole that makes higher culture, and civilisation, possible.

Reassembling the Pattern of Civilisation

The Manual of Civilisation reminds us that books are not just repositories of information, but vessels of cultural memory and agency. In a fragmented age, the divine command to Read in the Name of your Lord who Created takes on a renewed urgency.

Kasurian is an invitation to pursue the path of research as leisure. Serious research can be undertaken by anyone, and the barriers to expertise have never been lower. Become an amateur expert in something that fascinates you. Contribute your research through a newsletter, essays, discussion groups, or participation in online forums, and allow the community to test, challenge and refine your conclusions.

By embracing a culture of formal and informal expertise, a culture of research as leisure, we can restore our sense of wonder, and with it, the capacity to inform, negotiate and transcend the orthodoxies of our time.

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Further Reading:

• Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life - Zena Hitz

• The Pleasures of Reading in the Age of Distraction - Alan Jacobs

• Slow Reading in a Hurried Age - David Mikics

• A History of Reading - Alberto Manguel

• Notes Toward a Definition of Culture - T.S. Eliot

• Princes and Powers - James Baldwin

• Leisure: The Basis of Culture - Josef Pieper

• The Disappearance of Rituals - Byung-Chul Han

• How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information - Jillian M. Hess

• Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican - Galileo Galilei

• How to Read a Book - Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

• Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman

• Technopoly - Neil Postman

• How to Read and Why - Harold Bloom

• The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life - Harold Bloom

• The Study: The Inner Life of Renaissance Libraries - Andrew Hui

• The Sociological Imagination - C Wright Mills

• Tools for Conviviality - Ivan Illich

• How to Write a Thesis - Umberto Eco

• Dust Tracks on a Road (Chapter 10) - Zora Neale Hurston

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