like silk in the ear of the retired fighter, the ring’s voice beckons

~|~

Part of the answer turned out to be intellectual stimulation: the need to recreate a world beyond my usual concerns of writing, living, dancing. I have been living a comfortable life, but not necessarily an exciting one — not the kind of life that propels a man out of bed in the morning, eager to face the day. It has been a steady life, evenly paced; but now I feel the need to reintroduce some additional verve, spice, colour, variety, excitement. It is time to begin accelerating again.

As part of that project I have been reading a good deal, more than I have generally done over these past few years. The quantity and variety of my reading has rather been dropping off, and it’s time to bring it back up again. I want to come back to that ferment of the mind, with ideas interacting and shooting off in all directions. At my peak, when I had time, I was reading almost a hundred and eighty books a year; I doubt I even approach a hundred now. So now I’ve been reading books on science, on business, on fashion design; also novels, genre fiction, poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, psychology, even self-improvement. I’m casting the net wide.

I live a relatively long way from the city now, and the long bus journeys have been perfect for my reading: long uninterrupted tracts of time with nothing to do, no distractions save the landscape passing by. And today I came to the realization that my ordinary reading speed (without skimming, scanning, or speed-reading) has more than doubled over the past ten years. A decade ago I would have been able to read roughly thirty pages an hour; today I found myself doing seventy. And I wasn’t even trying. I haven’t lost it yet.