Umyazu

Reading is the art of attention. What a mess we’ve made of that word. From the earnest effort of a mind reaching for the world to a mindless, exasperated skittering through the slop. The attention economy is misnamed. Our attention is not being harvested but rather suppressed, flattened out, demeaned into submission. We do not attend anything when we doomscroll or binge watch or tap tap tap one notification after another; we abandon—ourselves, our bodies, our kith and kin. Nor do we read when we slip through the stream or flick through the feed. Reading is an awakening of attention, not a deadening of it. We read to come alive to ourselves, not to forget who we are or what we are doing, or what is being done to us without our consent. We read to encounter the world, to connect what we know to what we do not know yet, knowing all the while that such understanding is always temporary, lovely precisely because it is transient. The suspension of disbelief that a reader brings to a text is…