I have been learning to read less, and to read more. After the election I cut way back on news (following Garrison Keillor’s lead), and realized just how much time and mental energy I was spending gathering information that I couldn’t use. It doesn’t do any good to read fifty articles on Iraq or Afghanistan, because all fifty articles will start with the assumption that you don’t know anything about the subject. Far better to read a whole book about Afghanistan, because then, even if the information is inaccurate, at least you have some appreciation for the complexity of the situation.

I suspect that the sheer amount of information at our disposal these days is just confusing us. And deceiving us, because we never accumulate enough of an understanding of any one thing to really think about what it means. Sometimes it even leads to advanced cases of moral fetishism, where we get worked up about situations that are out of our control instead of learning to love the people around us.

Information may even be a sort of drug. For the vast majority of human history it has certainly been a scarcity. So people have valued what they could get. It was not uncommon for monks to have memorized most of the Bible, and there is some evidence (I don’t know how rigorous) that in primitive cultures the accuracy of oral tradition is extremely high. Perhaps, then, the only way to really appreciate an ancient (or good) book is to read it as slowly as you can, as if it were the only book you were going to see for a year.

In fact, there’s an ancient technique of reading called lectio divina which involves just that: savoring each phrase, and trying to enter into the mind of the author. Of course with books like the Bible or spiritual classics the technique becomes a form of meditation, an attempt to hear the voice of God. I’m just learning how to read this way. More later.

My housemate Tom is a very insightful person. We were talking about why a certain friend of his doesn’t drink, and I asked if it was for religious reasons. Yes, he said, so-and-so is very religious: he believes in preserving his self at all costs.

I’ve been thinking about this for several weeks now. Not really so much in philosophical terms, though I seem to be getting drawn in that direction (kicking and screaming). Just realizing, mostly, how lightly the self is held together - how the brain is constantly oscillating between states of inwardness and outwardness and of happiness and sadness; how perception depends on those states; how much of an impulse it is with me to protect myself from those oscillations, to avoid being at the mercy of my desires or my fears. I think that when you have seen me as inflexible, pedantic, or hostile I have only been trying to maintain control of my self and my perceptions of the world.

Well, something has come unmoored. I think I have only just gotten the words for what started happening a year ago almost to the day. I have learned how to let go (though I have closed myself as fingers). I am saying the big Yes, to God and the world and all the funny, beautiful creatures in it. Let desire and fear be replaced by love, and my life become a lectio divina:

 Do I contradict myself?
 Very well then, I contradict myself
 (I am large, I contain multitudes)
    --Whitman