First, surrender

You need to be able to sit still to be a reader.

Paul Theroux, Figures in a Landscape

Hunter S. Thompson

Paul Theroux makes this comment in his essay about Hunter S. Thompson in his book Figures in a Landscape. Thompson, although he wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and other books and articles, didn't read much. Theroux describes him as a "boisterous recluse," which may seem contradictory. Thompson liked to be moving, doing something, even if that something was writing, a seemingly stationary activity. Reading was just too stationary for him.

Today we seem to have a world full of Hunter Thompsons. Whenever I sit in a waiting room, I notice I am usually the only one reading. Others sit, but they play with their phones. Even leafing through the old magazines found in every doctor's waiting room now seems too stationary for most people.

Hyperactivity, once the province of nonstop children, now seems to have spread to their parents and grandparents as well. I shouldn't suggest I have been immune. As much as I love movies, I find it difficult to watch a DVD or DVR movie without doing a sudoku puzzle at the same time. Even when I am reading a book, I break once in awhile to play spider solitaire. I also listen to Spotify while reading and have to fiddle with that frequently.

So reading is hard today, even for those of us who still try to read, and that's because, as Paul Theroux suggests, sitting still is hard. Good reading takes focus, concentration. The more challenging the book, the more concentration it requires.

C.S. Lewis makes this observation in An Experiment in Criticism: "The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)"

Whether we are reading a book, watching a movie or visiting an art museum, how can we surrender when we are trying to do something else at the same time?