Our Culture of Shallow Hurry

Néhány kivonat egy cikkből, ami a mélyreható olvasásról, lelassulásról, ottlétről szólt.



Confronting a text whose meaning is initially obscure to us and being impelled to press onward, to work and think and wrestle, gives us the sort of discipline and training that genuine wisdom demands.


As our culture reads more poorly, it will speak more poorly and respond more impatiently and less charitably.

--

There is no true reading that does not ultimately undermine a posture of doubt, for there is no true reading that stops with only questioning and never seeking an answer.

--

Part of the problem is simply the volume of information that we now are bombarded with on a daily basis. Between our emails, social networks, and advertising, our attention is often pulled in a hundred directions simultaneously. Such inundation makes the sort of patient, slow, single-minded concentration that careful and close reading demands more difficult. Even when our minds are receiving helpful or true information, the demands of brevity and accessibility form our ways of thinking to make deep access unlikely.
Yet if we are not taught to read well, to sit with a difficult argument or plod through a complex and sometimes unsatisfying novel, we will lack the sort of patience that serious and substantial reason-giving for our positions demands.

If we are not practiced at momentarily accepting or adopting another’s commitments—as any reader must do—we shall find ourselves struggling to imagine why others think as they do. Even if they think wrongly, getting “inside their head” and seeing things from their point of view is a time-consuming process that demands careful, charitable, and attentive listening.

The more carefully and charitably we read, the more we open ourselves to the possibility of the habit catching on everywhere else in our lives.

It takes a well-formed mind to internalize a book, to sort through it and grasp not simply the ideas it proposes but the questions it is answering, and the presuppositions beneath those questions that make them problems for the view. It’s that sort of understanding that comes through reading and rereading, through making a home inside a text with those who know it better than we.

--

But we make a million decisions online, take a thousand of tiny steps per day, each of which reflexively shapes our character and our lives. We are formed through living, for good and for ill. -

Which is why there are few more countercultural tendencies we can cultivate as Christians than to read less but read better, to saturate our lives with the space to allow thoughts to bubble up in us, to pause and wait and notice and attend to all that God has made. Our late modern world is a frantic place, driven by what Augustine called the “libido dominandi,” the lust for power. Whether more money, more fame, or a better status for doing good, we are a people who have gone mad for more and are hurrying to arrive there before it is all taken away.

There can be no deep reading as long as we are people who hurry, whose eyes glaze over the text to say that we have read the book at our next social gathering. And for Christians, there can be no permanent hurry, either. To hurry is to deny the reality of God’s providence and to seize control over our lives. The urgent task of evangelizing the world is one done within the ordered pattern of rest and the peaceful repose of trust that God is the one who saves. The false hurry that so many of us (this author included) are dominated by is not a recognition of the importance of this life, but a denial of eternity. For as George MacDonald once put it, “Of all things, time is the cheapest.”