I am incapable of driving decently, learning choreography, playing any musical instrument that doesn't work by pounding on it, or faking normal social interaction, but my reading speed and comprehension? Phenomenal.
Near forty years ago I first stuck my nose into a book and pretty much never stopped unless forced. Even when I couldn't work, even when I couldn't take care of myself, even when I couldn't move for pain-- I kept reading, voraciously, compulsively and critically. Flash into a new
book and out again paradigm shifting in seven gears with all the implications, applications, and connections to all of the other books I've ever read moving at full speed. It's what I did. It's who I was.
Can't do it now.
Vision's going. Life's fractured. Brain's having bad days and better ones.
Now, I am a slow reader.
I've been dropped into an alternate dimension in which my one skill, honed for a lifetime, no longer matters much.
So, I'm starting to try to make what reading I can do matter as much as possible.
Slow reading has not brought me more savored pleasure, or a deeper sense of meaning, or a more nuanced understanding. Flat-out the opposite; there is no way in which my relationship to the written word has not been damaged and diminished.
So, my relationship to the written word can no longer be my rubric for success.
And that brings me to grapple with something even harder, and even sadder, than my loss of ability.
I'm a good listener if you're a good story-- but I'm not good at talking with people and I'm not good at writing (which is basically talking at people.) It's been really hard for me to make myself understood by people who have not read what I've read. So I am extremely well-educated and aware in a way that's had nearly no effect on the world.
If I don't do anything with it, then all the marvelous learning and sacred adventures I've had from books... are nothing more than a burnt-out junkie's memories of old drug trips.
So now, I am a slow reader; but, now, I'm trying to make my reading count.
