The pleasure of reading
Yesterday afternoon I finally got new glasses. These are bifocal glasses with a seamless transition between fields for distance and fields for reading, and if all goes well and there are no major adjustment problems, in a few weeks I can get new computer glasses as well. Today I am still exploring where the "blur zones" are and how I need to stand and turn my head to be able to see clearly without getting a stiff neck. This may take a little practice, but so far it is going reasonably well.
The first thing I did yesterday afternoon was to make myself comfortable in a corner of the couch and read the first 200 pages of a crime novel that Peter brought back from San Francisco with him in June. I don't usually read novels, but there is one crime novel author I like, who seems to publish a new book at about the same rate that I occasionally enjoy reading them.
Reading is such an exquisite pleasure! Reading - eyes flying over the pages, sometimes faster, sometimes slowing down, taking in descriptions of landscapes and characters all at once, keeping up with the plot and thinking along ... When the story started getting a bit creepy after about two hundred pages of normal size print, I skipped ahead to quickly skim through later bits to make sure that all the characters would be all right in the end. Skimming pages, taking in glimpses of the story to come all at once. This is a completely different experience from having to laboriously position a single page at a spot where I could focus on one or two letters at a time, stringing them together in my mind to form whole words, clinging to each word until I could collect enough to form a whole sentence, preserving each sentence to build a whole paragraph, struggling to grasp meaning in the course of repeating this process over and over ... Being able to read without having to make that effort is like flying, soaring over vast landscapes, disappearing into a different world.
When I was so ill immediately after the operation with a throat and sinus infection, fever and bronchitis, the hardest thing was not being able to disappear into a book, but feeling inescapably trapped in the immediate physical reality of feeling absolutely miserable. The only consolation was knowing that this trap was only temporary, but it was a small consolation because it felt like forever.
But now I can read again!
The first thing I did yesterday afternoon was to make myself comfortable in a corner of the couch and read the first 200 pages of a crime novel that Peter brought back from San Francisco with him in June. I don't usually read novels, but there is one crime novel author I like, who seems to publish a new book at about the same rate that I occasionally enjoy reading them.
Reading is such an exquisite pleasure! Reading - eyes flying over the pages, sometimes faster, sometimes slowing down, taking in descriptions of landscapes and characters all at once, keeping up with the plot and thinking along ... When the story started getting a bit creepy after about two hundred pages of normal size print, I skipped ahead to quickly skim through later bits to make sure that all the characters would be all right in the end. Skimming pages, taking in glimpses of the story to come all at once. This is a completely different experience from having to laboriously position a single page at a spot where I could focus on one or two letters at a time, stringing them together in my mind to form whole words, clinging to each word until I could collect enough to form a whole sentence, preserving each sentence to build a whole paragraph, struggling to grasp meaning in the course of repeating this process over and over ... Being able to read without having to make that effort is like flying, soaring over vast landscapes, disappearing into a different world.
When I was so ill immediately after the operation with a throat and sinus infection, fever and bronchitis, the hardest thing was not being able to disappear into a book, but feeling inescapably trapped in the immediate physical reality of feeling absolutely miserable. The only consolation was knowing that this trap was only temporary, but it was a small consolation because it felt like forever.
But now I can read again!
posted by Aileen at Tuesday, August 08, 2006
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