Literature is pure metaphysics
on books, reading, writing, and phenomenology of those (among other things or a lack thereof)
I don’t like the process of reading; there’s nothing more boring than staring at letters. I do, however, love what happens in my head in the process and hate when nothing happens. If the text fails to make my brain go brrr1, its existence falls victim to my selective solipsism2. Yet I can’t listen to audiobooks because my mind always slips somewhere else, which happens when I read a book, too, but it’s easier to get back, reread, pause, etm. if it’s letters and not sounds. Yet behind the letters are sounds; I can’t read without vocalising everything in my head and hear it. If I try to read without vocalising, I begin to skim and comprehension falls below zero, in which case I’m becoming dumber when “reading”, specifically because I perform reading but don’t actually do that meanwhile exposing myself to someone’s thoughts that aren’t properly filtered through my own grey sponge. Yet I can’t read aloud because inside my head, the pronunciation, intonations, etm. are perfect but when I do the same physically, it becomes slop. This all leaves me with only one viable way of reading—my internal narrator, or a few of them, reading everything to me in my head in a slow, measured way. Only that can make the process enjoyable, otherwise it’s just looking at letters.
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