And I have this wish because I suffer book-thirst. When I wander down the aisles of bookstores or libraries, I'm caught between an excitement for the knowledge and stories tucked away in the tomes I peruse and a gnawing anxiety at the limits of time and capacity for reading. To make matters worse, the excitement often evaporates when I've actually sat down with a book. I find myself distracted by the page number, caught in that same distortion of time that happens when I watch the hands of a clock tick and tock but feel that minutes take hours to pass. I scroll past pages like thumbing through Instagram––mindless until caught by some isolated thought that I love or hate.
Blinkist offers a seductive shortcut. What if I could merely shove plastic plugs into my ears and, as I walk, cook, or clean, passively receive the essence of the books I long to devour? Such a stream of content would surely slake the thirst, it seems. Isn't sound a more effective medium than sight for efficiently delivering the information I long to consume?
But there––that's exactly it––information is exactly the problem. We take "information" to be a neat package of facts to consume, but in his short, provocative history of that word, John Durham Peters suggests otherwise. Uncovering the origins of the term among disciples of Aristotle in the late Middle Ages, Peters reveals that to "inform" originally meant "to shape from within."
Sitting with this definition changes the idea of information completely, and with it, my concept of what reading could be. Instead of an object that lives in writing, information can become the subjective process of in-formation––those changes that happen inside me as I respond to what I read.
What is this "book-thirst" I feel? The longer I live with it, the more convinced I become that it's not a lust for knowing facts but a longing for insight into the rich connections of thought, to apprehend the notions I encounter and sense what they change inside my mind. It's not just a longing to read––it's a longing to be in-formed. And the result of the process of in-formation is, I think, to respond.
The experience of reading transforms when response becomes the goal. The clock-ticking, page-scrolling mindless stream of consumptive reading evaporates. My pace slows; time disappears. My mind expands beyond the words on the page and encompasses the colorful panorama of thoughts and feelings they engender. Instead of a feed of symbols to scroll over, the book becomes a world to enter.
In-formation bridges the gap between the excitement to read and the anxiety of never being able to read enough. The problem of "information overload" vanishes once I exchange information––the weight of innumerable facts––for in-formation––the dance of exposure and response.
What are the "key insights" Blinkist promises to deliver? Supposedly, they are the insights that already reside in the book––the nuggets of thought that purportedly live in the text waiting to be delivered to my mind by the process of reading. But like in-formation, in-sight is not a prepackaged item. It's what happens to me when I, painstaking, scale the edifice of a book.
An in-sight is the summit waiting at the end of a trail of thought. It's the sweat-earned vista that drives climbers to mountaintops. The landscape witnessed at the peak of in-sight is the rivers of me that bend into the book, the ridges and the hilltops of me that rise to meet its meaning, the fields and the meadows of me cast into relief by its height. A 15-minute summary of key insights is just a series of images in a feed––alienated, devoid of context, absent of experience, mindlessly thumbed past on a journey to nowhere.
Contra my own wish for simple reading, I seek edification. The book is an edifice another mind built, and by reading it, I seek to amble their thoughtways and edify myself thereby. Like all dances, reading in this way requires my full participation. And so my primary intention for the new life of this blog is to record my responses––that is, to read responsibly.
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