Never be in a hurry for yourself, only hurry in order to make the life of busy people easier. You’ll be rid of them quicker that way.
I’ve considerably scaled down my ambitions and gotten more done. No more wandering. Less wanting to be something and more doing something. But you can’t stay on the narrow path if you’re still rushing headlong like a blind goose.
You were promised a turtle in the title, I know.
I’m a slow reader. A really slow reader. And I try to be even slower. Unfortunately I don’t succeed at that as often as I’d like. But even my worst acts of speedreading don’t compare to the horror stories I keep hearing from other people, where they casually mention how they read a 300-400 page novel in a single night. If I attempted something like that, even if my comprehension wasn’t affected, which it most certainly would be, I would rob myself of all the enjoyment of savouring the book and developing a relationship with it over time.
At times I can spend half an hour on just a single spread without turning the page. I’ll get up and start pacing up and down, lecturing to an imaginary crowd about some particular passage or paragraph. Usually this applies more to non-fiction books than stories but still. I like to space out my reading over weeks and months. Even if I could read a book in a couple of days I don’t want to.
Usually I spend an equal amount of time finishing a book regardless of its length. I will read a 650-page history book in the same amount of time as a short 250-page novel. That means the average reading session of a short book is shorter in order to space it out over multiple sessions. I might read 100 pages in a day of a long book, but finishing a 100-page short story in one go? Nope, can’t do it. It feels wrong somehow. Maybe this stems from poverty? Always living in insecurity? If I finished a book in one go it would feel like I’d wasted it by binging it and then I’d be left with nothing. I have to ration my books carefully.
These are not hard-and-fast rules of course, exceptions do exist and it depends on the type of book and the reason why I’m reading it, but generally this is my reading pattern.
One of my favourite novels is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. I’ve been reading it for a little over two years but I’m only about half-way through this 500-page novel. I only pick it up and start reading when I’m absolutely in the right mood for it and I will read as s-l-o-w-l-y as possible; subvocalising every syllable with the same care as a child learning the alphabet, lingering in the whitespace between words and taking a trip up and down the curves of the serif typeface characters. And I’ll read only a single chapter a night, even if I want to keep going I’ll put down the book and instead try to re-live what I just read in my mind.
I like doing as little as possible as slowly as possible. Doing nothing is not a problem for me–I’m a born loafer. When a thought begins to form in my head, for hours it will feel like nothing is happening, the turtle’s foot is floating mid step, and I start to wonder: Am I thinking right now? But eventually the turtle’s little green foot lands on the grass and slowly he begins to raise another foot. This slow processing happens in the background while I’m doing other things on autopilot, unless something disturbs my carefully planned out routine.
Most people, I assume, think of their lives in time units of days. An hour is a discardable and, excepting extraordinary moments, purely functional unit: you use it because you need get shit done. But a day is a solid block of time to carve one’s life out of, right? I have a hard time conceiving of my lived experience in that way. Weeks or months are more adequate frames of time to use. Anything smaller and you’re cutting things into chunks that are too small to be meaningful. It is monday as I’m writing this. Sunday and saturday feel more like morning and forenoon than yesterday and the day before that. Maybe this is just a normal consequence of being a NEET for so long?
Whatever its cause may be, I like the way I am. I like being slow and I like when things take time. It baffles me to hear talk about “overnight shipping”, whatever that is, and seeing people get mad when they had to wait a whole three days! If my package arrives in the post office any sooner than three weeks after I placed my order I become confused. Things are not meant to not take time.
That was a weird tangent. Let’s get back to reading.
Sometimes I’ll sit down with the intention to read and instead end up sitting for two hours with the book on my lap and staring at the wall. That’s probably more of an executive function issue most of the time. This is a lot of words to justify me being lazy.
If a book is not worth reading slowly I doubt if it’s worth reading at all. If a book is not worth reading again I doubt if it’s worth reading at all. But a book that you only leafed through once and will never finish is perhaps the most worth reading of them all. Go figure.
Coincidentally, I read a somewhat related, and certainly interesting, post the other day about the cultivation of a sacred negative space of knowledge. It is a concept that has seen application in my life but never have I put it into words before. But when is willful ignorance falsely taken for innocence?
The more I write the more I want to retain my ignorance of the vast majority of literature, only taking what is vital from the best to develop my own sensibilities as a writer.
The more I practise some spiritual exercise, the more I want to retain my innocence and not expose myself to the exposition of its workings by others, even if they be more learned than myself.
Et cetera.
I have no fear of missing out on experiences. I have no shame in retaining my innocence. The time you spend doing something is time you’re missing out on doing nothing. If you’re not missing out you’re missing out on missing out. Missing out doesn’t make sense.
That is why I don’t worry about being widely read. You don’t need to read all that much if you know a few good books well, and to begin to know a book well you need to spend four hours walking, preferably in the woods, for every hour you’ve spent reading it. That’s not a recommendation, that’s a law of nature. I’ve observed and confirmed it empirically. Trust me.
I’m not a notetaker. I don’t carry a pen and pad around and neither is there a smartphone in my pocket. And that’s for one big reason: I don’t have an internal monologue to record. Sometimes this lack of an internal monologue makes me question if I’m capable of thought at all and I start to feel inferior and disparage myself for being intellectually lazy, which to be fair I often am, but when I open up a text editor or pick up a pen I don’t have words in my head. I don’t know what’s going to come out.
I’m capable of thinking in words, obviously, since language is needed for critical thinking, and sometimes I talk to myself, but I don’t feel the need to write it down. I know I can trust my memory, and even if I forget something I’m not distressed by it. It was not meant to be. Or rather it was meant to be and so it was, and now it has served its purpose.
Instead of taking notes I take long walks and then reminisce about previous walks I’ve taken on the same route if I want to think about something. A particular tree I pass by has layers of ideas associated with it. If ideas they be, not clothed in words, but rather vague feelings that seem so clear to myself. I can remember feeling a certain way on that particular walk where I stepped over a log with my left foot leading the way instead of the right. Every bodily movement and the environment over time becomes a map of your mental activity. I write my notes by foot.
Didn’t I just say I don’t take notes? And if a feeling is vague how can it be clear to me? Here’s an aphorism to dodge the question: If a text doesn’t contradict itself on atleast one occasion the author is lying to you by omission.
This is why, surprisingly, I don’t really get the point of travelling. Socrates never felt the need to leave his usual haunt in Athens. And neither do I. If you’re constantly globetrotting, your map is spread across the world, and since you don’t have ready access to it at all times it’s effectually useless. It’s better to stay close at home and keep your eyes open. Keep treading the same narrow path. Sustain a closer look and you can see the world in a [insert cliche here]. Try to look at everything and you’ll see nothing.
You don’t begin from the end. You don’t start counting at 10,000. But since were so broadly minded and mindlessly bored, our minds serving as room and board, a storeroom for minor bric-a-brac, I say let us start by clearing it out. To do that we’ve got to work our way backwards to the beginning. And since we’ve been treading the same path, our steps are quite clearly visible, thousands of laps of driving our heels down at the same spot. To start from the narrow end we have to count our way back to 1, only then can we truly begin to broaden our minds.
This is of course nothing that hasn’t been said before in a thousand different ways, but good advice should be repeated often and when you least need it.
I started writing this article about something completely different and tried to shoehorn this bit about reading in it. It didn’t work. Had to narrow it down. That’s what I must do, narrow down. Remember the path I’m on. No! Slow down. Because I sure as hell don’t feel like a turtle right now. I feel an uneasy tide beginning to ebb within me. I don’t like it. I hope I can atleast harness it to good use by directing it toward creative efforts, should the wave pick up more momentum.
Have I shot an albatross?
I don’t know which would be worse, getting dragged down by the current or being hurled by the waves against jagged rocks. Even an experienced sailor gets afraid on the sea.
I shall be alright.
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