Blog #118; In Defense of the Slow Read

 In Defense of the Slow Read

 

 

At various times in my life I have attempted to learn to speed read, particularly in college, or later, working as a technical writer on documents meant to convey purely technical information.   With technical information I had much better results.

 

The experience in college was a disaster, because I tried to speed read fiction and other "creative prose".  I just lost too much of the nuance, the flavor of the prose.  I think of prose and poetry like the verbal paint of a visual artist, where words form the colors and sound of the experience of the artistic work.  It took me over a year to finish War and Peace, and your average novel takes me at least a month to fully take in.   It took me over five years to write the novel In Love and War.  There is a certain enjoyment to reading and writing slowly, though.  The flavors, the textures of language.  Reading is no longer flat information, it is an experience to be immersed in.  Do you wish to immerse yourself in the fictive experience, swim in the waters of the world through another's point of view? 

 

Even as far back as thirty years ago, at the particular institution at which I was teaching, the composition director decided to focus composition 2 solely on research papers and framing arguments.  Prior to that, Composition 2 in the state of Florida had been primarily literature based, both analyzing literature and producing original fiction.  I truly enjoyed teaching fiction, both analyzing and practicing it.   It was a sad realization when I saw that the university no longer saw writing as an art and a skill to aspire too.  It soon became just another technical "competency", like coding in Fortran.

But today, with the shift of the "humanities" towards a tech-based world, as Jacques Barzun noted in his last eminent master work From Dawn to Decadence, the vital life force in contemporary fiction is under attack from the forces of AI, as Barzun foretold, and the academy is helping big tech along in the race to dehumanize the humanities.  The future of the art of literature darkens.  Please don’t let the sweetness and light fade away in your own writing and the choices you make for your nightstand.

And as a reader, in this blog, I am asking you to slow down and soak up the author's voice as a human being having a shared experience.  Try not to glean.  Rather, absorb more fully.  Slowly.  Thoughtfully.