ark & text

To read a book was to practice an unnatural process of thought, one that demanded sustained unbroken attention to a single, static object. It required readers to place themselves at what T.S. Elio, in Four Quartets, would call ‘the still point of the turning world.’ They had to train their brains to ignore everything else going on around them, to resist the urge to let their focus skip from one sensory cue to another. They had to forge or strengthen the neural links needed to counter their instinctive distractedness, applying greater ‘top-down control’ over their attention…What was so remarkable about book reading was that the deep concentration was combined with highly active and efficient deciphering of text and interpretation of meaning. The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge readers acquired from the author’s words but for the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.

…Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn’t involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or a replenishing, of the mind. Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was—and is—the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading.”

What is left to say? In the end, you died. And with your last mouthful of breath you carried away the person you had been, you took away the person I was with you.

At the end, you said, This time I know I am going, and you are staying. But someone unknown to me was the one who survived, saying, If only, if only we were still alive.

Joan Didion, in The Year of Magical Thinking (via minima–moralia)

so many places to walk to and fro (with a book in tow)

[the title is] A NAME, by Ada Limón

When Eve walked among

the animals and named them -

nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,

fiddler crab, fallow deer -

I wonder if she ever wanted

them to speak back, looked into

their wide wonderful eyes and