The National Council of Teachers of English put out a position paper arguing that book reading and essay writing should take a back seat in the classroom. Teachers, the paper suggested, should focus on media literacy instead. Short texts. Content students feel is relevant to their lives.
Jimmy has a question.
Would you rather be operated on by the brain surgeon who read the books, or the one who read the bullet points?
You choose.
What Maryanne Wolf Said
Maryanne Wolf is a neuroscientist at UCLA who has spent her career studying what reading does to the brain. She wrote Reader, Come Home, which is about what happens to the reading brain when we stop reading deeply. Her conclusion is not encouraging.
But the line Jimmy keeps coming back to is this one:
We must give our young an opportunity to understand who others are — not through little snapshots, but through immersion into the lives and thoughts and feelings of others.
Immersion. Not snapshots. Books. Not bullet points.
The brain surgeon who read the textbooks didn’t read bullet points about surgery. He read the full account — the cases, the complications, the thinking of surgeons who came before him, the way problems develop and the way solutions emerge. That immersion built something in his mind that snapshots cannot build.
Wolf is saying the same thing about human understanding. You cannot develop genuine empathy — the capacity to be in another person’s experience — through social media posts and short-form content. You develop it by spending sustained time inside another consciousness. And guess what: that’s exactly what classical literature does! The only other way is living itself. Books just help you on the living part.
What Marcus Aurelius Is
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is not a summary of Stoic philosophy. It is not a self-help book organized by topic. It is not, in any conventional sense, a book.
It’s really a diary — the private notes of a Roman emperor writing to himself, in Greek, on a military campaign, trying to think his way through the problems of living. He was not writing for publication. He was not writing for posterity. He was writing for himself about himself, because writing was how he clarified who and what he was: A Roman emperor and solider.
When you read the Meditations slowly and carefully — the way Jimmy reads them on this channel — you are doing exactly what Wolf describes. You are immersed in another’s consciousness. Not a fictional consciousness, not a constructed narrator, but a real man’s actual thinking, luckily preserved across nineteen centuries.
You are in his mind. The way he was trying to be in the minds of the people around him. Figuring out how to live right.
The Argument Against Shortcuts
The case for short content is always the same: people are busy, attention is limited, you have to meet readers where they are.
Jimmy’s counter-argument is equally consistent: you become what you practice. If you practice short, fragmented attention, you develop short, fragmented thinking. If you practice sustained, immersive reading, you develop the capacity for sustained, immersive thought. You heard of “you are what you eat?” Well, you are what you read and how you live.
Marcus Aurelius could not have written the Meditations if he’d been raised on bullet points. The connections he makes — between his Stoic philosophy and his daily experience, between the writings of Epictetus and the behavior of the people around him, between the atoms of the universe and the fear of death — require a kind of thinking that only develops through reading long things carefully.
And thinking about those things.
The NCTE’s position paper would have produced a different emperor. A less useful one.
Read It With Jimmy
This channel exists because Jimmy believes that the experience of reading the actual words — all of them, in order, slowly — is irreplaceable. Not a summary. Not highlights. Not the best quotes assembled into a summary or list.
The actual words. The way Marcus wrote them. With a reliable translator like George Long. Including the repetitions, the circling back, the passages that seem to contradict each other, the moments where he’s clearly struggling with something he hasn’t resolved.
That’s where the immersion is. That’s what you can’t get from a snapshot.
Read the Meditations with Jimmy. Every word. Carefully.
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