You read at your own pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media...
Slowness is at a premium these days.
Practices that bring our bodies and minds to equilibrium are vital.
Your practice of nocturnal engagement with a piece of historical fiction or memoir stands as a subversive act in a world of content that seeks to set an inhumane pace. The ruthless elimination of hurry requires we choose alternatives to our culture's norms and practices.
...You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you...
Our lives are curated.
Feeds and inboxes dictate what we see on a daily basis.
Possibly we once chose where our attention went online, but we never fall away from this choosing with a book. We read what's in front of us, what we've decided to hold and finish. Anything else we imbibe comes from and to spaces explicitly marked for the taking by online interests.
...Reading a story, you may be told something, but you're never sold something...
Every feed is a marketplace.
Even the moments that feel free have been paid for by someone hoping to recoup the cost of your attention.
A story has no conversion funnel. The author told you something because it needed telling, and the transaction ended when you picked up the book. Nothing tracks whether you lingered on page 43. No one retargets you for finishing chapter six.
...And though you're usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind...
We've confused connectivity with communion.
A thousand mutuals, and still the ache.
But a reader alone at midnight with a dead author is less lonely than most of us are online. One mind reaching toward another, slowly, with full attention. This is what platforms imitate and cannot produce. Turkle called it being alone together but reading inverts this way of being.
...You aren't being brainwashed or coopted or used; you've joined in an act of imagination.
This is the final subversion.
The feed renders; the book requires.
Every scene you read, you build. The room, the light, the face of a character no illustrator ever drew. Reading is the last popular art form where the audience does half the work, and that labor is precisely what makes it yours.
No one can optimize an act of imagination.
So read slowly tonight. It's the most quietly defiant thing you'll do all day.
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Operating Instructions (2003)