I wish I could spend four hours every day reading, and another four hours writing. It seems to me that I am getting better at nurturing, or noticing, or harvesting, the synchronicities that flash between my attention to problems in the real world and the things I’m reading. No doubt what I choose to read in some way bears on what is going on around me — sometimes this is explicit, as when I read about collapse or social development as a way of learning about and coming to terms with the direction the world is heading in; other times, there is some undercurrent or unseen force or forces guiding my hand… or possibly simply an attentiveness to features of a text which might otherwise slide unnoticed into the background.
The ringing of the text sets the world to humming along. The ways of the world bring the texts that sing harmony.
To think how many people go through life having little or nothing to do with reading! The only worlds they escape into are like the shopping malls of the mind. Nothing is freely given; although it all looks so inviting, so all-enclosing, that completeness and sufficiency is an illusion. These are places where your mind goes to be comforted with thoughts of exchange, value, and cost. These places close at night and have security guards.
