My friend, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Caille Millner, has a good column out today about the “Slow Reading” movement. I’ll let her tell you about it. From, “Learning How to Read Again, This Time Slowly:”
Like the earlier movement for Slow Food, the idea behind Slow Read is that our current approach to something fundamental is making us unhealthy. If Slow Foodies were convinced that McDonald’s hamburgers were killing off culinary traditions and making us all obese, Slow Readers are suspicious that reading “thought pieces” on our mobile devices are making us shallow and stupid. They want us to sit down and read books, preferably without digital interference.
Reading is good. But I am not sure about focusing on reading as an issue of health and wellness:
More: It seems to me that pushing reading as a health issue reflects how fearful we have become amid our incredible societal successes. We live longer, healthier, and more prosperously than at any time in history–and it is never enough. We are scared of limits and morally offended by the prospect of natural decline.
Before enjoying Millner’s column, I read a long story about Peter Thiel in the Telegraph. He wants to “cure death.” From the story:
The ‘life extension project’, Thiel says, is as old as science itself. ‘It was probably even more important than alchemy. Finding élan vital, the water of life, was of greater interest than finding something that could transmute everything into gold…
On a fundamental level, the question is whether ageing can be reversed or not…If it is possible to understand biological systems in informational terms, could we then reverse these biological processes, including the process of ageing? I do think that the genomics revolution promises a much greater understanding of biological systems and opens the possibility of modifying these seemingly inevitable trajectories in far more ways than we can currently imagine.
I am not against researching to find treatments for diseases, of course. But this obsession with somehow “curing death” seems rather pathetic. To me, it is an indication of such worry–of death, of limitations, of decline–that it moves into a denial of reality.
Ironically, many who proclaim the mantle of “rationality”–and disdain those who find their hope in faith–are the most devoted to the search for an unfindable Fountain of Youth. Interestingly, the wisdom of the great faiths urge memory of our coming deaths as the key to finding the best ways of living.
Thiel is part of the transhumanist movement, fueled by terror of death and so disdainful for of human limitations that it wants to “seize control of human evolution”–as if we have the wisdom–to achieve immortality and the ability to recreate ourselves in and our own image:
I’m gonna live forever
I’m gonna learn how to fly (High)
I feel it coming together
People will see me and cry
The other day, I posted about Ezekiel Emanuel’s stated desire in The Atlantic to die at 75. The entire piece reeked of abject terror of decline and limits:
The fact is that by 75, creativity, originality, and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us…Dean Keith Simonton, at the University of California at Davis, a luminary among researchers on age and creativity, synthesized numerous studies to demonstrate a typical age-creativity curve: creativity rises rapidly as a career commences, peaks about 20 years into the career, at about age 40 or 45, and then enters a slow, age-related decline…
How do we want to be remembered by our children and grandchildren? We wish our children to remember us in our prime. Active, vigorous, engaged, animated, astute, enthusiastic, funny, warm, loving. Not stooped and sluggish, forgetful and repetitive, constantly asking “What did she say?” We want to be remembered as independent, not experienced as burdens.
I’m 65. Certain changes have already started. Am I happy about that? No. Sometimes, I get depressed. More often though, I laugh about being on the downside of the mountain.
But I think working to stay healthy and agile–and emotionally adjust to the world being run by those younger than me, perhaps the hardest part–is much better than pounding my head vainly against reality:
For the rhythm of life is a powerful beat
Puts a tingle in your fingers and a tingle in your feet
Rhythm on the inside rhythm in the street
And the rhythm of life is a powerful beat
Back to Millner: She concludes her piece on Slow Reading on a far healthier note:
Reading isn’t dieting. Who needs to feel more shame about what they’re not doing right? Who needs yet another reason to feel inadequate?
Speaking for myself, I know why my philosophy reading group has made me happy, and it’s nothing to do with my health…Instead, what worked was pleasure: the social pleasure of talking about something serious with people whose opinions I respect, the ecstatic pleasure of wrestling with something impossible until it becomes clear, and the bodily pleasure (we always pick places with good wine) of the experience. It counteracts all the disgust I feel from being hit by a tsunami of Internet foolishness every day.
So that’s my advice to the Slow Read movement — do what the Slow Food people did and emphasize pleasure, not the fact that it’s good for us…
Ahh. Don’t you feel better already?
Exactly. At some point we have to set aside the fear and just live the ride.
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