Invitation to bovine reading

Printed text has become a hieroglyph for many students. It requires a great deal of concentration for results that are not immediately apparent. They find it a daunting task to keep in mind the general plot while paying attention to the small details.

However, sustained immersion in the text, in addition to making the beauty of the well-spoken word accessible to us, educates our resistance to distraction, stimulates critical thinking and self-reflection; helps us humbly delve into the inner life of a Dostoyevsky or a Plato; teaches us to respect arguments that challenge our convictions; allows us to grapple with contradictory ideas and accept discomfort rather than resolving it prematurely; expands the limits of our imagination; trains us to understand before judging (an essential habit in a pluralistic society) and in the dialectic of text and context, etc. It therefore has a high intellectual and moral component. Getting used to reading a complex text and persevering in the effort of comprehension is one of the skills with the greatest future. Obviously, I am not talking about the fast-book, which entertains but does not nourish, but rather from reading that imitates the mellifluous work of bees or the rumination of oxen.

Slow reading isn't limited to collecting experiences, but, according to Seneca, flies "everywhere to gather from the flowers what is suitable for making honey." It isn't content with simply accumulating pollen, but rather collects what it has found here and there, so that, without hiding its origin, it has a different, personal flavor. "This is what nature does daily in our body." The food we eat is not ours until it has been digested and becomes our flesh and blood. "Let us do the same with what nourishes our spirit, and let us not allow what we receive to remain whole and alien. Let us grasp it, because if we don't do so, it will pass into our memory, but not into our understanding." Reading slowly is, therefore, nostrar.

Slow reading enables us to feel like members of the universal republic of the Spirit, which is a community of ruminants headed by medieval monks. meditation For them, it was the attentive application in the exercise of inscribing the texts in one's own soul. They understood reading as a ruminationIn these times of widespread weakening of attention, perhaps the time has come to train it with the tools of humanism.

Ramon Llull writes his own Book of Wonders: "Once upon a time, a philosopher, after he had studied, went out of the city to amuse himself, and saw an ox that had been eating for a long time in a field of wheat. When the ox was satisfied, he left the field of wheat and entered the desert, and approached near a tree, and withdrew near a tree. That philosopher returned to the city, and by the example he had learned from the bull, he climbed a high mountain with all his books.

"And he discovered new sciences." That is, he made honey.

"We should write as bees make their honey, not by preserving flowers, but by transforming them into honeycombs, so that from a great number of diverse resources a single product is born that is both different and better," writes Petrarch in Boccaccio, defining humanism.

Baltasar Gracián collects this vocabulary in The Criticón and concludes that the most notable animal superiority is "that of rumination, which is admired and not imitated in some of the unclean ones," because it is a great thing "to go over again for the second time what was swallowed half-chewed the first time, that slow crumbling of what we swallowed quickly."

From Gracián, his great admirer, Schopenhauer, takes the image, who insists that only by ruminating is what is read assimilated and takes shape and root in the mind. And from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, great master of slow reading (see his wonderful prologue toAurora), who states forcefully, "what is needed above all is something that is precisely the most forgotten today [...], something for which one must be almost empty, and in any case not a modern man: ruminating..." (The genealogy of morality).

This is how Deleuze introduced his 1983-1984 course: "I will tell you quite frankly what I would like to do this year […]. I would like to do philosophy in the manner of cows."

The best way to show what we've read is through writing. But we'll talk about that in two weeks.