“If reading heightens your responses, shapes your idea of the world, gives you a sense of the purpose of life, then it is not surprising if, over time, reading should come to play a proportionately smaller role in the context of the myriad possibilities it has opened up.
The more thoroughly we have absorbed its lessons, the less frequently we need to refer to the user’s manual.”
Via The Millions: an essay by Geoff Dyer on the affliction known as “reader’s block,” from his forthcoming essay collection, Otherwise Known As The Human Condition.
Strangely, this is also the fourth time in as many days I’ve heard or seen a reference to The Book Of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa, a wonderfully melancholy, ruminative little book I read in my mid-teens and since forgot about. Until recently that is.
