That’s how old people read. You can see them in the library. Their speed of reading is the speed of speech.

They mouth the words. They taste them, savor them. They respect the author who wrote them.

There are commercial enterprises that teach speed reading. You pay them for the exercises. Your eye is trained to catch “key words” as you skim the pages as fast as you can turn them.

You take the comprehension test. 90% is mastery. 50% is adequate. You are like a lawyer looking for clues of evidence. They write it up and call it a brief.

This is not reading.

Anything less than 100% means you did not actually read.

If time is not allowed to pause and reflect, you do not respect the process of writing or the function of words.

You are clear-cutting the forest for quick easy cash.

You are in a race from here to there. This is not living. It’s bare existence. Below a minimum.

We have a curious phrase, “giving lip service.” That means we know we don’t mean what we say, they are empty token words. It’s a useful acknowledgement that allows us to lie under oath.

In a diminishing world, we are quick to cut to the quick.

We assume the end of the world will come after we are gone.

Fewer and fewer people know how to read. Fewer of those actually do.

We don’t bother to teach our children to read, and they eagerly comply.

Artificial intelligence, emphasis on artificial, forget intelligence, relieves us of the burden of needing to know anything.

Even when I was young, I loved to read, and did it a lot.

People said, “You’re not like us,” meaning “You’re weird, you’re strange. You actually read that stuff? and understand it?”

I was too polite to say, “You should try it sometime.” I probably just said, “Yes.”

I even read poetry. You read it slow. You taste the words and they release multiples. You read it again, and there’s more. Sometimes it sticks in the mind of memory and you read it again without your eyes.

I’m a slow reader, always have been, always knew it.

Even as a child, I knew that reading was fast or slow depending on the pace of the content. Straight line prose, an adventure novel, is a race to the finish.

I went to college. The Professors said, “Read this. Now tell me about it.”

So I did, and sometimes they would say, ”I didn’t notice that.”

Sometimes they would say, “Welcome,” and sometimes they would back away.

I was happy teaching school. Students would say, “Now I like to read.”

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I will never read all there is. I find consolation in the joy of reading what I can.

I realize that I am old people and sometimes move my lips as I read. Sometimes you can hear me.