Brain Food #783: We can all be philologists
"It involves Russia."
Thoughts of the day
I have been thinking about what it means to read well, especially during a time when it is a common trend to come across lists of ‘The 52 books I read this year’, and entire applications and services exist that condense years of thinking and writing into fifteen minutes.
Perhaps this is spurred by a certain fear of missing out, or simply existential dread, that pushes us to consume as much as possible, sometimes without giving ourselves time to truly absorb what the meaning is.
Though there may be value in speed, it has its casualties. Not all forms of content are made to be consumed fast. Reading a book that is 500 pages long in one week is not the same as reading a book that is 100 pages long. As Woody Allen once said, “I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
Perhaps this ‘binge-culture’ is something companies like Netflix are guilty of. Serialisation used to mean waiting for a period of time for something to be released, the sense of anticipation adding to the enjoyment and creating a different form of pace in consumption than what we are used to today. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was originally a collection of twelve stories published serially in The Strand Magazine, while many of Charles Dickens’ works were originally released in serialised form, although this was of course also due to the fact that, at the time, novels were too expensive for middle-class readers to purchase.
Friedrich Nietzsche referred to slow reading in his discourse on philology, suggesting how it can be a tool to juxtapose the haste of modern living:
“For this very reason philology is now more desirable than ever before; for this very reason it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of “work”: that is to say, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-skurry, which is intent upon “getting things done” at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not “get things done” so hurriedly: it teaches how to read well: i.e. slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.”
As I write this, I also think that it might finally be time to pick up Infinite Jest, or The Master and His Emissary, or Ducks, Newburyport, or other long books that have been decorating my shelves, without a self-imposed deadline on when I should finish them.
And, slow reading can also teach us how to take it slow in other areas of our lives. In some ways, we can all be philologists, acknowledging that some things just need their time.
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