The lost art of reading
On the lost art of reading. I agree completely. I have had to retrain myself to read while at the seminary. Laptop lid down, incandescent only, no noise, and plenty of time. Its still hard work but easier than my first year. The lost art of reading -- latimes.com
Such a state is increasingly elusive in our over-networked culture, in which every rumor and mundanity is blogged and tweeted. Today, it seems it is not contemplation we seek but an odd sort of distraction masquerading as being in the know. Why? Because of the illusion that illumination is based on speed, that it is more important to react than to think, that we live in a culture in which something is attached to every bit of time. Here we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take the opposite position, that we immerse, slow down. After September 11, Mona Simpson wrote as part of a 2001 LA Weekly round-table on reading during wartime, "I didnt read books for the news. Books, by their nature, are never new enough." By this, Simpson doesnt mean she stopped reading; instead, at a moment when it felt as if time was on fast forward, she relied on books to pull back from the onslaught, to distance herself from the present as a way of reconnecting with a more elemental sense of who we are.
