The lost art of reading
…what happened? It isn’t a failure of desire so much as one of will. Or not will, exactly, but focus: the ability to still my mind long enough to inhabit someone else’s world, and to let that someone else inhabit mine.
Eventually I get there, but some nights it takes 20 pages to settle down. What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs and fragments that add up to the anxiety of the age.
When settling in to read something deep (long-form articles from The New Yorker, Infinite Jest (which I’ve been working on for the past few months) ), I have to fight the urge to check something, anything: tweets, new posts, whatever I can get my hands on. I’m only able to really put my head down and concentrate if I’ve got everything else off. I have to put some ambient music on loop, close the laptop, lock the phone, and force myself to disconnect.
This quote is largely off-topic, but it’s too lovely to not call out:
Back then, if I’d had the language for it, I might have argued that the world within the pages was more compelling than the world without; I was reading both to escape and to be engaged.
This perfectly captures how I feel after an especially satisfying novel/novella/short story. “How wondrous would it be to exist in this world instead of mine?”
