"The Owl Has Flown" Reading Response

In Sven Birkerts “The Owl Has Flown” he begins to explain the new way people are reading as well as writing. He explains that reading has changed from “vertical” to “horizontal” implying that depth and understanding of vertical reading whereas horizontal is the variety of texts accessible. Birkerts goes on to say back in time when books were rare, expensive, and hard to obtain you got a chance to really analyze the information in these “prison” or “desert island” books. Continually re-reading a text gives you a thorough in depth idea of what the author is trying to say. What Birkerts explains in today’s reading is people are more commonly skimming over the reading not allowing the ideas to fully be comprehended or as Birkerts says “resonate inwardly.” He is continually bringing the aspect of not depending on our memory to light in his essay. When people had only a handful of reading materials such as scripture, they were able to incessantly re-read and memorize passages getting an infinite depth to the text at hand. I feel that this is the key part of the essay that really made me able to grasp what Birkerts trying to elucidate. These paragraphs can be found on page 30 in his essay. He is making this claim to reiterate his main idea of the whole essay. I feel that people, including myself, never re-read books mainly because there is such a huge selection and such a long list of books that I would like to get to in my lifetime. I have re-read a handful of my favorite books and definitely concur with Birkerts that you can get so much more out of it after multiple reads. I unquestionably know that the second or third time I have read a book, I have found things that I never fully understood and got so much more out of it. There are so many accounts that I have read a passage and only understood the face value of what the author was trying to present when it in fact it had a much deeper purpose. I think that Birkerts is opposing the idea that Clive Thompson “On new Literacy” presents. In Thompson’s article, he explains we are heading in a great new direction of reading/writing where Birkerts thinks previous generations had a better grasp on reading as well as writing. I think Thompson would have to agree with Birkerts but Thompson’s main idea was that students are now able to write so much because of all the text they have access to.