Disclosure

Lately I've seemed to be totally unable to finish a book. I can’t get through Foucault, never get done with Eco. Not even the by comparison easily read Edelfeldt manages to prolong my attention span. A couple of days ago I started on Leviathan by Paul Auster, in the hopes of getting my reading back. Considering I’ve never really liked neither The New York Trilogy nor the Book of Illusions, this might have been a lost cause from the beginning. On the other hand, Paul Auster is a well renowned author and I thought his fluent language would be able to help me in my misery. (Well, maybe it isn’t misery in the way it could have been, but if you are used to taking to reading when you need a break from life, not being able to do so is quite disturbing.)

It took me some time to understand what was going on and the answer, my friends, is this: People are talking too much. Somewhere along the road of intellectual history, being able to express your thought in as many words as possible, has become the attribute of knowledge and aptitude. An example: when I took classes in philosophy, the people that were loudest and most talkative were considered the most brilliant. Even repeating what was just said or pointing out the obvious, gave applause from the rest of us, either being so much in awe of their confidence that we didn’t listen properly, or ourselves completely lacking the confidence to speak up, and so making this misconception persevere. Some of my comrades also thought gesticulating a lot when you talk is a sign of intelligence, but that must just be momentary confusion, yes?

Anyway, back to the talking. You know how everyone stops and listen when the wise man speaks? I’m imagining some kind of Buddha, which is quiet for a hundred years and then utters one, very mysterious, sentence. There might be something in there, you think, so I’d better listen really carefully. Or the wise Indian, who is the only one in the camp who knows anything about medicine; you’d better listen to him! (And then there is your mother, who you are supposed to listen to, but never do. A whole other story there…) Might it be the case that somewhere along the way we forgot who we are supposed to listen to, why people are talking, and that now we believe that anyone who manages to say something we don’t immediately understand, is our superior? “Say something better yourself then!” you might object. To which I will answer, that I’m not sure that I can, but I will declare that I am probably capable of saying the exact same thing, in far less words. 

Now, this might all be true, or the fact might be that I am just too lazy to read books where the letters are tiny, the sentences long and in which there is no dialogue anywhere in sight.