“Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.”
—Cyril Connolly, English journalist, born September 10, 1903
On Not Finishing Books
Once I went to the library on a Saturday morning and took out some books, came home, read them, and returned them in the afternoon, so I could get some more. I was seven or eight years old, and had just gotten my first library card.
It’s long been my belief that most of life is a set of more or less unpleasant chores that you have to get out of the way in order to get down to life’s real business: reading.
Now, I still read all the time, for pleasure and instruction. But I finish less and less of the books I start reading. Much of the reading I do is on the Internet, in the form of blog posts and other articles. There’s simply less time for books.
My attention span is also shorter, and my patience is limited. A book that starts to bore me gets abandoned. I guess I don’t feel any obligation to finish them anymore, as I once did. The scanning habit has become natural.
There seems to be more to read, too: as if a greater infinity of reading matter exists on the Internet than the already-infinite amount of stuff there was to read in libraries and bookstores, like Cantor’s distinction between the infinity of integers and the greater infinity of real numbers.