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The Art of Slow Reading
Tibet is in Asia!
When I was a kid I read an article in a magazine written by a Vietnam veteran who spent a couple of years in a North Vietnamese POW camp. The article really impacted me; so much so that I still think about it now a half century later. The article was about the art of slow (very slow) reading.
Being corralled into a small enclosure like livestock with ten or twelve other men, there was very little to do but think and go crazy. Then one day a compassionate North Vietnamese guard gave the men a paperback book which he had confiscated from a G. I. It was a thick American classic by Faulkner or maybe Steinbeck. I don’t remember.
The men were excited by this because it gave them something to do (read!). Instead of fighting over the book the men devised a way to share it. Each day the book would be passed around to each man who was allowed to read just one page. They could take as long as they want to read that one page — they could even read it twice — but that one page was all they could read.
At the end of the day everyone had read that one page and they would discuss it. The next day everyone would read the next page. It took the men over a year to read the book this way!
The article writer wrote about how the most exciting part of his day was when he had that book reading…
