It’s a blustery Monday morning in September, and the wind is whipping the first patches of red in the maple outside Mary’s window. Inside, Mary is wrapped in a fleece blanket and a story — chapter seven of “Whistler,” Ann Patchett’s latest book, read by the daughter beside her bed.
“It’s a moody day,” says Mary, 90, glancing at the clouds and smiling serenely. “She’s got a lovely voice to listen to.”
It’s a warm Saturday night in August, and four kids are tucked into lofted bunk beds in a cabin overlooking the Mississippi River. They’ve been swimming all day, and now it’s story time, read by flashlight: Roald Dahl’s “The Twits.”
Even the sleepiest swimmers snicker at the description of Mr. Twit foraging through his food-filled beard: “By sticking out his tongue and curling it sideways to explore the hairy jungle around his mouth, he was always able to find a tasty morsel here and there to nibble on.”
At 90 or 9, at the end of a day or the end of a life, there’s something about being read to that settles us in.
The clock requires coaxing and corralling. Cleats, cars, commitments. Sometimes there isn’t enough breathing room. So, I’m embracing the ritual of read-aloud every evening — a long exhale, a sweet surrender of the day. What’s done is done, what’s not done can wait.
I turn off the lights, grab the flashlight and open the book, and invariably, miraculously, time slows down. Stresses vanish. Together, we enter the story. We’re crossing the prairie by covered wagon. Skating down a frozen canal. Training a pet falcon. Outwitting the Doomsday Gang. Mixing a marvelous medicine.
We resume where we left off the night before. Bookmark found, pages spread. “Where were we?”
There is tenderness in that question. The story continues because we returned to it. Comfort in the continuity.
And its significance goes even deeper. Read-alouds feel like a defense of the human person and a protest against artificial intelligence.
It’s getting harder to find originality. The Wall Street Journal’s Opinion section now permits outside contributors to use AI as long as the ideas belong to the contributor. Anything for more clicks, more scrolling, optimization.
The read-aloud, meanwhile, is inefficient in all the best ways. We’re not simply transferring information. We’re saying: You are worth sitting beside. You are worth slowing down for. I’ll give this story my voice because I want to share it with you. Let’s take our time.
In his new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV warns that AI must never eclipse what makes us human, and he cites “reading stories to a child” as an example of how we learn to care for one another.
Such acts, he writes, “train us to recognize others as persons worthy of attention.”
There it is, that premise of Catholic social teaching: the dignity of each person. It must always come first.
We must remember how to make meaning. We must look for evidence of humanity, signs of life. Fingerprints. Handwritten notes. The mid-sentence sneeze in a read-aloud. Crooked lines that lead straight to the heart.
Three of the four swimmers are now asleep in their bunk beds. They have entered more fully into the story.
Only the oldest hears Roald Dahl observe that no matter how “wonky” your nose, good thoughts “shine out of your face like sunbeams.”
And Mary, tucked in her hospice bed, is now looking out at the rain, reflecting on all the stories she’s heard. Her favorite, she says, is Allen Levi’s bestseller “Theo of Golden.”
“It’s about the journey,” Mary says. “We all have a journey.”
A peacefulness washes over her. Her red rosary is in hand.
“I just love people,” says Mary, echoing the spirit of Theo, who treats each person he encounters as “worthy of attention.” Her story is wrapped up in a greater story, and she’ll wait, contentedly, for the next page.
Capecchi is a freelance writer from Grey Cloud Island, Minn.
