Reading Response #3

Birkerts is conveying to his readers in his essay, “The Owl Has Flown”, how much reading has changed over time. That back in the day people had less to read so they would read what they had over and over again. And by this gain a deeper knowledge of the texts. Birkerts refers to this as vertical, as depth. When there is not much of something you value it more. Now we have mass amounts of materials to read. We do not read things as comprehensively today, we read lots of different things. Birkerts refers to this as horizontal. Today we know little bits about lots of different information unlike when people would know lots about a few things. To quote Birkerts, ”When books are rare, hard to obtain, and expensive, the reader must compensate through infested focus, much like Menocchio read the same passage over and over, memorizing, inscribing the words deeply on the slate of attention, subjecting them to an interpretive pressure not unlike what students of scripture practice upon their texts. This is ferocious reading-prison or “desert island” reading and where it does not assume depth it creates it“. To summarize this I would say, if you do not have much of something you are excited about it, you value it. You feed on it like a starved lion. You do not desire something knew but are satisfied to know everything about what you have. I could relate this passage to my own life and my love for baseball. I love to watch a good game. If there was only one game to watch, I would watch that game over and over again. I would know every pitch and every swing of the bat by heart. I would memorize tendencies of the players, signals of the coaches. However there are several channels filled with games so I do not need to absorb one game so completely. I feel the passage I quoted is important in Birkerts essay. Because it encapsulates his entire opinion, that we have lost depth in our reading. We want to be taught but do not want to learn. We want to gather information without having to invest time or energy. My generation has become soft and lazy when it comes to learning. We do not even need to pull a book of the shelf to get information. I think what Birkerts is trying to get us to believe in this essay is valuable, that we have lost the art of reflection and contemplation. That because of the vast amount of materials we have, because of the age of technology and because of our fast pace world that we live in we simply do not pause to absorb the deeper meanings in the text we are reading.