A habit is a spell you cast upon yourself that only you can break. “We are spinning our own fates, good or evil,” William James wrote in his pioneering treatise on the psychology of habit. What we habitually let in — ideas into the mind, people into the heart — shape what we become. In lives that begin as accidents of chance and go on being besieged by myriad chance events beyond our control, the choices that become habits are the most powerful instrument we have for being active agents in our destiny — none more transformative than the habits by which we govern our attention.

Novelist Samantha Harvey considers how to best resist being turned into passive pawns in the attention economy in her conversation with my friend Natascha McElhone who, besides being a beloved actor in her primary life (and generously lending her time and talent to narrating the audiobooks of Figuring and Traversal), co-hosts the excellent podcast Where Shall We Meet — a guided tour of the minds and worlds of some of the most interesting and creative people alive, from writers and philosophers to astrophysicists and polar explorers.

With an eye to the great heist of mind that is social media — a system built to benefit the bottom line of companies by exploiting our psychological and physiological vulnerabilities, training us to be passive “users” of “content” rather than active participants in the co-creation of meaning that is literature — Harvey offers a compassionate way of meeting ourselves where we (like or or not) are, and beginning there in the project of striking a better balance between passive and active attention:

There are times when it’s incredibly active and pleasurable and generative to go down these clickbaity rabbit holes online and just be amazed at what you can find. It can spark all sorts of thoughts and challenge things that you felt and give you new information… It’s a magical thing to have, absolutely, and I do that myself… I just get to call it research… We have at our disposal this amazing world of not just information but of other people’s thoughts and feelings and interpretations, and that’s a great invitation, I think. [The question is] how do we stay active in that process when built into the structure is this imperative to become passive.

Responding to Natascha’s observation that active reading is not unlike dreaming — a kind of sustained and thrilling presence in another world by an act of unselfing that requires, as Natascha puts it, “being in one place for long enough to traverse into someone else’s psyche, to be interested enough to get out of your own head and into someone else’s” — Harvey reflects:

When I write, and also when I read, and probably in slightly different ways, dream-like spaces open up. And I think that is [what good books] invite — they ask for attention in a way that nothing else does, quite… The act of attention and of imagination takes work… but [books] also offer us something… spellbinding… [A great book] will have you enraptured, it will hold you in this dream space. That’s what you want as a writer — to arrest your reader, to to take them up in the spell and not let them down and not make them want to leave.

This, she observes, is the difference between reading, which demands the active imagination, and consuming “content” by scrolling passively through a “feed”; the difference between being compelled to stay, by means of a generous offering of another world, and being coerced to stay, by means of nervous system manipulation. It is also the difference between reading for information and reading for illumination. Harvey likens the former to “a corridor along which information is carried” that you passively pace, whereas the latter — the experience great books give us — opens doors on all sides of the corridor so inviting that you begin to actively and joyfully wander all the different rooms, spellbound by what you find there:

Fiction… opens up the possibility of other consciousnesses, other spaces, other ideas — and not just the ones that the author provides by telling you information, but the ones that are opened up in your own psyche through your own memories… multiple, countless rooms that you walk through, one to the other, and you never really know what’s in the next room or how many rooms there are, but it’s space — in a life that can sometimes feel rather breathless and and full and stressful and and distracted, suddenly you’re in something quite palatial that is only limited by your own imagination.

This difference between passive consumption and active imagination sounds to me like the difference between a trance and a dream. In a trance, something other than ourselves is in possession of our minds. In a dream, parts of us — the shy, the unheard, the neglected, the wild — come to the fore and begin to live, boldly and imaginatively, returning us to reality a little more integrated, a little more awake to our own complexity. Dreaming, which evolved in the bird brain as a laboratory for practicing the possible, is a highly active and dynamic state in constant, if coded, conversation with the conscious self of our waking life. It is an act of unselfing in order to become more fully ourselves. To refuse to be entranced and choose to be enchanted may be the most important habit in that most important choice of investing our consciousness: to whom and what we gift our attention.

Couple with Doris Lessing on how to read a book and how to read the world, then revisit Virginia Woolf on why we read.