Reading is a wonderful activity to engage in. It requires one to sit alone in silence and engage with a text written by a whole other person. It is a connection through human language. But reading is different now then it used to be. It is harder to find silence in our lives to read. We are raised in our society to always be striving for goals and to have a successful career and have more of the next best thing.
I have made time for reading a lot more lately. I enjoy the sitting alone, quietly engaging in reading words and sentences of a good novel or some poetry. I read a lot and many different kinds of books but I have to have silence to do this. I can read in a public space like a coffee shop some of the time but it is best to do at home, with no electronics on, maybe a candle lit. Just a quiet solitude with few distractions.
It is becoming increasingly harder for us to find this kind of space in our lives and I think then it is even more important to go out of our way to find it. Society today is in a big rush, a hurry to do the next thing. We need to slow down and quiet our minds to listen to who we truly are and what we truly need. David Foster Wallace said in an interview that "it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore." It's like we are all in a race to do things for ourselves, get things for ourselves, and not sharing our experiences. Reading quietly (and slowly, cherish that experience) is a way to connect with this sharing.
Here is another DFW quote from the interview below: "Particularly now in computer and internet culture, everything is so fast and the faster things go the more we feed that part of ourselves [the self-gratifying part] but don't feed the part of ourselves that....that likes quiet."