[HPforGrownups] Reading

[Caius Marcius]

No: HPFGUIDX 3378


----- Original Message -----
From: "Peg Kerr" <pkerr06 at attglobal.net>
To: <HPforGrownups at egroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 8:11 PM
Subject: Re: [HPforGrownups] Reading


>
> From _The Artist's Way_: (see pp. 87-89)
>
> "If you feel stuck in your life or your art, few jump starts are more
effective
> than a week of reading deprivation.
>
> No reading?  That's right: no reading.  For most artists, words are like
tiny
> tranquilizers.  We have a daily dose of media chat that we swallow up.
Like
> greasy food, it clogs our systems.  Too much of it and we feel, yes,
fried.
>
> It is a paradox that by emptying our lives of distractions we are actually
> filling the well.  Without distractions, we are once again thrust in the
> sensory world.  With no newspaper to shield us, a train becomes a viewing
> gallery.  With no novel to sink into (and no television to numb us out) an
> evening becomes a vast savannah in which furniture--and other
assumptions--get
> rearranged.
>
> Reading deprivation casts us into our inner silence, a space some of us
begin
> immediately to fill with new words--long, gossipy conversations,
television
> bingeing, the radio as constant, chatty companion.  We often cannot hear
our
> inner voice, the voice of our artist's inspiration, above the static.  In
> practicing reading deprivation, we need to cast a watchful eye on these
other
> pollutants.  They poison the well.


This is similar to something Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo

Another counsel of prudence and self-defense is to react as rarely as
possible, and to avoid situations and relationships that would condemn one
to suspend, as it were, one's freedom and initiative and to become a mere
reagent.  As a parable I choose association with books. Scholars who at
bottom do little nowadays but thumb books....ultimately lose entirely their
capacity to think for themselves.  When they don't thumb, they don't think.
They respond to a stimulus (a thought they have read) whenever they think -
in the end, they do nothing but react.....

Early in the morning, when day breaks, when all is fresh, in the dawn of
one's strength -  to read a book at such a time is simply depraved! [end
quote]

    - CMC (who hastens to distance himself from Nietzsche's stance on this
matter)