"The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecceliastical pamphlet, or novel, or pem, is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a larger audience. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short."~ philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, from his Essays and Aphorisms"Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful for me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust."~ author Italo Calvino from his novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
Friday 30 August 2024
"The art of not reading is a very important one."
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I used to immerse myself more in a book I was reading, but in the past 10-20 years find myself reading more in the way that Italo Calvino describes. In some respects that could reflect a degraded attention span, being impatient to get to something that provides instant gratification or relevance - something I think our modern connection to our devices and limitless sources on the web encourages.
However in other respects I think it's a positive in terms of making myself integrate what I'm reading with what I already know or understand, finding applications to my own life and experiences that are most useful, in ways the author may have not necessarily intended. Or as a filter, dismissing and not considering further something I judge to be off track or have no great value. I think there's a balance to be found there - enough attention and focus to understand the author's perspective, but not becoming so immersed in their world that you become detached from reality.
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