The death of reading is threatening the soul
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The death of thinking is threatening the soul.
• Bill Gates reads 50 books a year. • Mark Zuckerberg reads at least one book every two weeks. • Elon Musk grew up reading two books a day. • Mark Cuban reads for more than three hours every day. • Arthur Blank, a co-founder of Home Depot, reads two hours a day.
Yup. He didn't get those factoids from reading books. Mayhaps he received these gems of wisdom from:
When I read an online article from the Atlantic or the New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article’s length. My mind strays, and I find myself clicking on the sidebars and the underlined links. Soon I’m over at CNN.com reading Donald Trump’s latest tweets and details of the latest terrorist attack, or perhaps checking tomorrow’s weather.
I have 20,000 books to the author's 5,000. I'm not kidding. SQL database provided on demand. # books don't matter so much, it's what you do with them.
Reading is a proxy for thinking. Reading is only useful for those eureka moments (now called "a-ha moments" -- I guess it's shorter?) and for information gain. A walk in the woods, a pithy tweet, an encouter (a dialog -- a communiation -- a discussion -- an interaction -- an intercourse) with another human (fucking) being can also provide that eureka moment.
Stop reading, start learning. The best education is observation and participation. I'm all for books, but if they ain't teaching us about how to solve our own problems, then fuck them books. Get the knowledge, get the power. But be conscious, be aware, pay attention, did you miss it? You missed it. That's okay, I did when I wrote it, but if you hash the previous paragraph (algorithm you'll have to figure out), you'll get 2 bitcoins. I hear they might still be worth something. I read that in a book.
* Dictated, not read.
I personally have no doubt that the above response was not written by bot. At this current moment in history -- mind this was written on 2017-07-25 (ISO, EDT, YMMV, HHGTTG, etc.) -- bot technology had not yet progressed to the stage that all HN comments were being persused by bots that knew that dead prez was written in lowercase, not uppercase.
I'd like to thank my bot for calling this to my attention so that I could answer personally. He only deploys on special occasions -- I doubt that any more than 0.4% of HN comments have been made by him.
<random quote> For we are the future, and we are the past. We are not the present -- this is not a gift. </random quote>
Only through the act of imagining a narrator or character's emotional state can you enjoy a book, and doing so brings one to identify with or at the very least understand better the circumstances that individual faces.
Yes you can do this face to face, or by living a life that might be represented in a novel, but literature is a far more efficient way to broaden experience.
Books are not purely about learning facts, figures, dates and fates.
Be careful with the only. I've read and enjoyed plenty of books while neglecting sympathy for the characters and their experience; looking at the interplay of ideas and theories, for example.
Sometimes I think it's been due to my lack of context. For instance, I love the little Dostoyevsky I've read, but I'm always perplexed by the social world of his characters. Maybe they're high bourgeois and clashing with the strain on that order in the Russia of his day. Still, I thoroughly enjoy the other elements of his writing that come to life. I was surprised to find the most thrilling so far was the first half of Notes From Underground. It reads like sci-fi to me: all of the talk about everything being calculated and determined in advance.
I think he's one of the most empathetically evocative authors there was - by the end of crime and punishment if you can't identify with Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, you've assuredly missed a beat.
That said, context is all - and it's helpful to also read his contemporaries, understand Russian history of the time on a broader scale (this too one can acquire from books), and then follow through on the trajectory of thought and feeling with the likes of Solzhenitsyn and Bulgakov, before landing at the post-glasnost world with Pelevin and Kurkov.
We will never become what we cannot imagine.
Here's the money paragraph in full.
When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus, in which I delve as deeply as I can into the ideas concerning this topic, discussing the definition of a princedom, the categories of princedoms, how they are acquired, how they are retained, and why they are lost. And if ever any whimsy of mine has given you pleasure, this one should not displease you. It ought to be welcomed by a prince, and especially by a new prince; therefore I am dedicating it to His Magnificence Giuliano. Filippo da Casavecchia has seen it. He will be able to give you some account of both the work itself and the discussions I have had with him about it, although I am continually fattening and currying it.
[1] http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/flor-mach-lett-ve...
I would, however, cut the the paragraph as follows. Everything after is just an adversisement for the authors blog.
When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study..."
Well... It's one of the many "blogs" worth reading. And a very old one. (sidenote: I'm really not sure you can even call it a "log" of any kind)
The Atlantic is usually interesting for me, but this was a major problem before. The way to combat it is to read it anyway. With lots of practice, you'll train yourself to be more focused and ignore that conscious awareness of 'ticking time'.
Edit: language
> A walk in the woods, a pithy tweet, an encouter (a dialog
> -- a communiation -- a discussion -- an interaction --
> an intercourse) with another human (fucking) being can
> also provide that eureka moment.
With that said, the mind is like other muscles. It has a limited capacity. That is, it also needs recovery. Reading "Your Brain at Work" was a seminal moment for me.
Finally, reading, observing (as mentioned above) and watching (i.e., TV or mobile device) seem to be three different things. They each engage the mind (and thought process differently). Based on my experience, there is a difference in people who read the news, and those who watch it. Reading, to me, is active. Watching is passive. How you think (about the news, for example) effects what you think. Or so it seems.
The whole thing reads like a dressed-up humble-brag of how many books the writer has (5,000).
But what is "many books" ? Some books are 30 pages long and life time deep.
Everyone is different but if you enjoy reading, yet feel you don't have time, or want to strain your eyes after a day of screen staring, I would recommend trying it.
I'm also quite dubious of the attention-span theory. It doesn't seem to have much science behind it, only cultural momentum. The most interesting study I read recently was how the proximity of smartphones can diminish cognitive abilities. But that, to me, is a question of notifications and social functions. [Edit: I just saw The Shallows below, I'll look into it]
We are more interconnected than ever. We can instantly find stimulating discussion on an incredible depth of topics. We read more than ever. What we are experiencing, in my reading, is a measurement/phenomena bias. Now we can find out what the [Jones' next door] think of what's on the news, which disappoints us, rather than allowing ourselves to consider it private and so never give it a second thought. It's not necessarily that the world, or humans, have changed in some ground-breaking, global-depression-explaining manner - simply that the doors to our opinions and habits are more open than before.
Perhaps this does indeed have some effect, in a more permanent sense. But I regard this more as a function of the tendency for people to out-source beliefs. It only takes an hour or two to find the worst of all humanity, and the best. The drafty corridors between people these days carry beliefs across the degrees of separation faster than ever before. My pet theory is it's the beliefs about ones capabilities or 'type-destinies' which hurt the emotive liberals for supporting liberal democracies. It's the cultural-state beliefs that hurt the 'realpolitik' conservatives in gripping the real politics. On both accounts, I do think this can be resisted, but it takes time and psychological space that we have replaced for 'productive' work in mostly zero-sum economic activities.
When it comes to fashionable (and effective) practices like CBT and meditation, I like to ask whether they are assistive for the human condition generally, or just our present condition. Marrying an internalised locus of control with an ebb-and-flow outlook on life could be the healing function. Or perhaps we simply need to arrest our sense of personal identity, and alight the cultural train every so often.
But my Goodreads account is still alive and kicking, and my Kindle account is full of crispy new releases which I do read. Books are the world.
That cuts out a lot of the distracting ads and links.
And the more you read the faster you get: you don't decipher every word. You notice a standard structure and get the meaning. That's why reading things written by a foreigner can be slower.
And honestly after some time you learn to not read useless paragraphs: read the first, read the last, if it is mainly the same thing you can forget about what's in-between. The worst offender is LotR: song? Pass; character description? Pass 5 pages.
While I don't know much about Elon Musk's reading habits, outlandish sounding unfalsifiable claims are sometimes just that.
I skim pretty often too. There are several reasons. One, a little of what the author was contending; it is harder to hold attention. But there is more to it. Most media is not worth my full attention. I used to love fiction. But most plots are old, and few scenarios are new to me anymore. News articles tend to be 1 paragraph of new information, then blah blah blah a recapitulation of everything I already knew. When I read science as part of my job, I read it in two ways. One I scan vast numbers of abstracts. This gives me a sense of the lay of the land. Then I do a deep dive of reviews. Then I read critical papers, with a pen, every sentence carefully, building ideas, bridging concepts, and also, evaluating the method. Can you imagine doing that with a report from cnn? Why?
It's not easy.
I can certainly relate. What's the solution?
I played around with a Firefox extension that would paginate(?) an article for me, and found I could then much better tolerate reading long ones where I before would jump ahead for "the meat".
But I also find that way too many "technical" articles these days try to turn what is being written about into a "social" piece. This by adding a whole bunch of back story on the people involved, and many even back story on their parents and grandparents...
In a nutshell, the solutions involve mindfulness, making deliberate choices in regards to checking e-mails, Instagram, etc., meditation or just concentration practice, exercising the hippocampus by reading longer books.
As for people in general who largely would never force themselves to do anything on their own I doubt there's a quick solution that isn't based on shame and social pressure.