The Slow Movement

One of the great joys in my life is reading. Slow reading. Reading purely for my own leisure. Reading not to finish the book as fast as I can, just to return to my daily life, or another of the infinite books worth reading, but reading deliberately slow, to savor the content of the book, to contemplate this content, and to let it illuminate my daily life, and merge into my being, so that the experience of the book becomes a part of me, not a momentary diversion. Reading not as consumption, whether it is the consumption of entertainment, or of ideas, or of great art, but reading as a creative act, where my experiences illuminate the text, and the text illuminating my experiences, and they grow together and merge into one. In short, the kind of reading where the book becomes my friend.

Reading of this kind entails certain time consuming practices. It is frequently necessary, for example, to close the book and sit in inactivity, not to contemplate with philosophical vigor, but simply to let the mind wander and explore the place to which the book has brought it, emotionally and intellectually. It is also often necessary to stop reading in order to copy passages out of the book, to save for some later, unknown purpose, or merely to mark down out of infatuation.

In my reading, and by reading I mean the process of creating new experiences out of the merging of my own mind with that of the authors, a particular type of event often precedes one of these decelerating acts. I read a passage where the author has stated some mixture of my nebulous ideas, half-understood truths, and semi-conscious longings in perfect expression. They seem to state what I have understood already but could not express, and the author becomes a confidant in my most intimate thoughts, and a partner in their development.

For some reason though, when I have fully developed an idea, and then find some author or person who has stated it just as well as me before I did, I feel disappointed. I want some kind of credit for an original thought! This is the feeling I had when I discovered/invented conspicuous unconsumption. Recently, when I discovered The Slow Movement, of which slow reading is just on expression, I had some type of mixture of the two above mentioned emotions.