Im also a subscriber to her Substack. Naomi wrote an article about the New Yorker that is the greatest thing Ive ever read on the internet. She is a gem.
Part of the problem is the loss of irony. People who insist on thinking and reading literally lose their capacity to think ironically. They don’t recognise when a writer is speaking at a slight angle. Then lines from books get quoted, criticised, or repeated as though their meaning were obvious, when the whole point may be that they are more complicated than they first appear.
Books allows us to enter the thought process of a writer and reading the 'great books" allows to be engage in the process of listening and engaging with writers that had impact on their time. You immerse yourself in these ideas and can make the connection of these ideas framed and influenced the time frame they existed in.
Reading is one thing; understanding is something else. Censorship and book banning usually have the opposite effect, promoting interest in books that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World that in the future, it would not be necessary to ban books because no one could read. If that were true, we would not have libraries. The people who matter will always read. The codex will always be there, simply because reading is by far the fastest and most efficient way to introduce information to the human brain. The real question is: what information? The fact is that time is a more serious limitation than censorship. We only have so much time, so much of an attention span; how do we use it? What do we focus on? Psychological studies have shown that critical insight often emerges from the subconscious when we aren't focused on the problem we are trying to resolve. So we need both focused attention and a period of random non-attention, a walk in the park, or simply zoning out. The key is balance and a sense of what is worth noticing. The great books can provide invaluable insight, and the fact that they are now instantly available marks a tremendous advance in human understanding, but it's worth realizing at the start of the journey that you will never know it all. The best we can do is to capture a sliver of what's there while we pass by on the conveyor belt to infinity.
Im also a subscriber to her Substack. Naomi wrote an article about the New Yorker that is the greatest thing Ive ever read on the internet. She is a gem.
Part of the problem is the loss of irony. People who insist on thinking and reading literally lose their capacity to think ironically. They don’t recognise when a writer is speaking at a slight angle. Then lines from books get quoted, criticised, or repeated as though their meaning were obvious, when the whole point may be that they are more complicated than they first appear.
Books allows us to enter the thought process of a writer and reading the 'great books" allows to be engage in the process of listening and engaging with writers that had impact on their time. You immerse yourself in these ideas and can make the connection of these ideas framed and influenced the time frame they existed in.
Can't wait to get my copy. Thanks for the review!
Can't wait to get my copy. Thanks for the review!
Enjoyed this review.
Reading is one thing; understanding is something else. Censorship and book banning usually have the opposite effect, promoting interest in books that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Aldous Huxley predicted in Brave New World that in the future, it would not be necessary to ban books because no one could read. If that were true, we would not have libraries. The people who matter will always read. The codex will always be there, simply because reading is by far the fastest and most efficient way to introduce information to the human brain. The real question is: what information? The fact is that time is a more serious limitation than censorship. We only have so much time, so much of an attention span; how do we use it? What do we focus on? Psychological studies have shown that critical insight often emerges from the subconscious when we aren't focused on the problem we are trying to resolve. So we need both focused attention and a period of random non-attention, a walk in the park, or simply zoning out. The key is balance and a sense of what is worth noticing. The great books can provide invaluable insight, and the fact that they are now instantly available marks a tremendous advance in human understanding, but it's worth realizing at the start of the journey that you will never know it all. The best we can do is to capture a sliver of what's there while we pass by on the conveyor belt to infinity.