Recent reading: “the encroachment of the buzz”

I read this the other day in The Lost Art of Reading by David L. Ulin. I wonder if anyone else relates.

This, I think, is something on which we can agree: to read, we need a certain kind of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. That seems increasingly elusive in our overnetworked society, where every buzz and rumor is instantly blogged and tweeted, and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know. In such a landscape, knowledge can’t help but fall prey to illusion, albeit an illusion that is deeply seductive, with its promise that speed can lead us to illumination, that it is more important to react than to think deeply, that something must be attached to every bit of time. Here, we have my reading problem in a nutshell, for books insist we take an opposite position, that we immerse, slow down. “After September 11,” Mona Simpson wrote as part of a 2001 LA Weekly roundtable on reading in wartime, “I didn’t read books for the news. Books, by their nature, are never new enough.” Simpson doesn’t mean that she stopped reading; rather, at a moment when it felt as if time was on fast forward, she relied on books to pull back from the onslaught, to distance herself from the present as a way of reconnecting with a more elemental sense of who we are.

…These days, after spending hours on the computer, I pick up a book and read a paragraph; then my mind wanders and I check my e-mail, drift onto the Internet, pace the house before returning to the page. Or I want to do these things but don’t, force myself to remain still, to follow what I’m reading until I give myself over to the flow. What I’m struggling with is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there is something out there that merits my attention, when in fact it’s mostly just a series of disconnected riffs, quick takes and fragments, that add up to the anxiety of the age.

I don’t spend “hours on the computer,” yet I do find myself having to make more of an effort to “force myself to remain still, to follow what I’m reading until I give myself over to the flow.” I long for the time to sit down and read, but when it comes, I find it hard to settle in and focus. Like Ulin, I can make myself stick with it till I’m immersed, but it seems to take longer, or take more work, than it used to.

Why?

Whatever the answer, I’m glad for books — partly because they confront me with questions like this.