quality time with Courbet's Lady with a Parrot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art I am afraid.
Too much time searching for information, seeking key aspects of something, has caused my mind to function differently than it once did. I have given myself the power to deem what is or is not irrelevant and I skim surfaces with great abandon. Reading makes this painfully apparent. I have forgotten how to love language, read each word, revel in the story as oppose to gleaning a sense of the passage and moving on to the next. The latter strategy is essential in my field but am I able to separate it from life?
Technology, I suppose, exacerbates this problem. Of course, one could never read every word produced online but the speed and convenience of computer-based expeditions seem to be allowing my attention span to grow increasingly short.
What if this spills over into interactions with people? Who am I to suggest what or who is worthy of attention? How dare I 'skim' over a person, only to retain information that directly pertains to me.
I am afraid.
And so a battle plan will be put in place. Reading for the joy of words and imagination, allowing time to pass without morbid fear and more time spent talking with people - be it over a glass of wine or over a retail counter - might save me from such a grim, short-sighted, self-centred fate.
Let me recommend some beautiful books: A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry; Family Matters - Rohinton Mistry; In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje; The Passage - Justin Cronin; Life of Pi - Yann Martel; The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold; and, for a guilty pleasure with amazing characters, the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. And of course I'll send you a copy of my book when it's published (but that's a few years away).
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