## Metadata - Author: [[David L. Ulin]] - Full Title: The Lost Art of Reading - Category: #books ## Highlights - This is what literature, at its best and most unrelenting, offers: a slicing through of all the noise and the ephemera, a cutting to the chase. There is something thrilling about it, this unburdening, the idea of getting at a truth so profound that, for a moment anyway, we become transcendent in the fullest sense. I’m not talking here about posterity, which is its own kind of fantasy, in which we regard books as tomb-stones instead of souls. No, I’m thinking more of literature as a voice of pure expression, a cry in the dark. Its futility is what makes it noble: nothing will come of this, no one will be saved, but it is worth your attention anyway. ([Location 257](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=257)) - Over the years, I’ve met many of the writers whose work helped to transform me: Vonnegut, Roth, Heller, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion. In almost every instance, it’s been gripping, although even the best of these encounters has felt glancing when compared to the imminence, the interiority, of their books. Now, I take it for granted that the real relationship is not with the writer but with the writing, that it’s on the page where we find the deepest sympathies. ([Location 286](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=286)) - “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear,” Joan Didion notes in her essay “Why I Write,” and it’s no understatement to suggest that this is what the dynamic between a writer and a reader offers from the other side as well. Or it was, at any rate, until the moment I became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read. ([Location 333](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=333)) - to read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. That seems increasingly elusive in our overnetworked society, where every buzz and rumor is instantly blogged and tweeted, and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know. In such a landscape, knowledge can’t help but fall prey to illusion, albeit an illusion that is deeply seductive, with its promise that speed can lead us to illumination, that it is more important to react than to think deeply, that something must be 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 roundtable on reading in wartime, “I didn’t read books for the news. Books, by their nature, are never new enough.” Simpson doesn’t mean that she stopped reading; rather, 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. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=339)) - At the heart of the crisis is not just the evaporation of what we once referred to as shared assumptions, but even more, a dysfunction of language, a failure of the tools of rhetoric and logic on which consensus relies. ([Location 394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=394)) - In her 2005 book Rereadings, Anne Fadiman traces the distinction between reading and rereading: “The former had more velocity; the latter had more depth. The former shut out the world in order to focus on the story; the latter dragged in the world in order to assess the story. The former was more fun; the latter was more cynical. But what was remarkable about the latter was that it contained the former: even while, as with the upper half of a set of bifocals, I saw the book through the complicating lens of adulthood, I also saw it through the memory of the first time I’d read it.” ([Location 498](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=498)) - “Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves—that’s the truth,” he acknowledged in a 1933 essay called “One Hundred False Starts,” published in the Saturday Evening Post. “We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives—experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.” ([Location 519](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=519)) - “One must believe in the reality of Time,” Simone Weil wrote in her Notebooks. “Otherwise one is just dreaming.” ([Location 697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=697)) - time is all we have. This is the point, that we live in time, that we understand ourselves in relation to its passage. It may be the thing that will ultimately devour us, but without it we lose a sense of who we are. Time, however, is the enemy in contemporary culture, less a source of context than constraint. We bridle against its limitations—not existentially but in far more prosaic terms—subdividing it into the merest bits and pieces, translating it into dollars gained or lost. ([Location 701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=701)) - This is where reading, real reading, comes in—because it demands space, because by drawing us back from the primacy of the instant it restores time to us in a more fundamental way. It’s not possible to read a book in the present, for books exist in many moments all at once. There is the immediate experience of reading, but also the chronology of the narrative, as well as of the characters and author, all of whom bear their own relationships to time. There is the fixity of the text, which doesn’t change whether it was written yesterday or a thousand years ago. Perhaps most important, there is the way reading requires us to pay attention, which cannot help but return us to the realm of inner life. ([Location 766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=766)) - “My experience is what I agree to attend to,” William James noted in his 1905 treatise Psychology. “Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.” ([Location 771](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=771)) - In The Sound and the Fury, that great harmonic convergence of a novel, Quentin Compson—schizophrenic, on the verge of suicide—puts it in the starkest possible terms. “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire,” he recalls his father saying, after presenting Quentin with a watch, a family heirloom. “I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.” ([Location 792](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=792)) - Memory is really the story left behind by forgetting—the essence that remains when the years have stripped away all that useless particularity. You remember as much by forgetting as you do by remembering. ([Location 807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=807)) - “We have to remember to stop because we have to stop to remember,” Judith Shulevitz writes in The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time ([Location 816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=816)) - “Whenever we, as readers, come upon a link,” Carr observes, “we have to pause, for at least a split second, to allow our prefrontal cortex to evaluate whether or not we should click on it. The redirection of our mental resources, from reading words to making judgments, may be imperceptible to us—our brains are quick—but it’s been shown to impede comprehension and retention, particularly when it’s repeated frequently.” ([Location 995](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=995)) - In one way or another, I’ve been reading on a computer ever since it meant looking at green phosphor pixels against a black background. And I love the prospect of e-reading—the immediacy it offers, the increasing wealth of its resources. But I’m discovering, too, a hidden property in printed books, one of the reasons I will always prefer them. They do nothing. ([Location 1235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=1235)) - Note: Verlyn Klinkenborg - New York Times, April 15, 2010 - I do not believe that anything is lasting; all of it will be taken from us in the end. Chaos, entropy . . . the best that we can hope for are a few transcendent moments, in which we bridge the gap of our loneliness and come together with another human being. This is what reading has always meant to me and what, even more, it means to me now. ([Location 1408](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=1408)) - Reading, after all, is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more than for us to disengage. It connects us at the deepest levels; it is slow, rather than fast. That is its beauty and its challenge: in a culture of instant information, it requires us to pace ourselves. What does it mean, this notion of slow reading? Most fundamentally, it returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. Even more, we are reminded of all we need to savor—this instant, this scene, this line. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise, the tumult, to discover our reflections in another mind. ([Location 1424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B004DI7F5I&location=1424))