Technology has killed my ability to read. Perhaps it's not my ability to read that it's killed, perhaps it's my desire.
As the phone continues to turn my head into more and more mush (and this is someone who for years has known that this is happening), my ability, my attention or my willingness to pick up a book and spend time in the joy of reading and in the joy of reading something tangible and physical seems to have diminished.
I noticed this recently as I picked up the book that I was reading when I was on holiday in Portugal in October. I started reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell. Given to me by my daughter's boyfriend, Callum, who is in his early 30s, but still someone who completely understands the joy and benefit of reading tangible things. Callum (Grace's Callum, not my Callum) is one of the most well-read and rounded readers I've met for many a year, and we were talking about books that we'd loved and things that we liked, and I took the Orwell book with me to Portugal.
I had just finished rereading the Northern Lights by Philip Pullman and fell into the Aspidistra only to come home, put it beside my bed, and hardly at all for the space of 3 months, get the chance to pick it up, and it is not a large book.
At the same time, I was travelling to my mum's, and I walked into the little bookshop in Edinburgh Waverley station and had a look around. I was completely uninspired, only picking up a book about AI (which surely is a contradiction in terms), and so, I guess the answer is this.
Reading and reading from a book is like going to the gym, going on your bike, or walking your dog.
When you get out of the habit and in front of it, it feels like a chore, it's only when you start regularly again to embrace it that you realise the benefit, the joy, the wonder, the beauty of doing that thing, which just makes you better by doing something that you like.
Time to start again.
I remember a line from a James song way back in the day, it comes back to me at times like this, “today, I won't think of any sad things, I won't think of torture or the rape of nature, just today, I won't read those sickening papers”.
Blog Post Number - 4421
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