00:00Reading requires sitting alone by yourself in a quiet room and I have friends, intelligent friends, who don't like to read because they get, it's not just bored, there's an almost dread that comes up, I think, here about having to be alone and having to be quiet and you see that when you walk in, when you walk into most public spaces in America, it isn't quiet anymore, they pipe music through.
00:29And the music's easy to make fun of because it's usually really horrible music, but it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet ever anymore.
00:37And to me, I don't know that I could defend it, but that seems to me to have something to do with when you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself and get things for yourself and go all the time,
00:53there's this other part of you that's the same part that can kind of, is almost hungry for silence and quiet and thinking really hard about the same thing for maybe half an hour instead of 30 seconds that doesn't get fed at all.
01:08And it makes itself felt in the body and a kind of dread in here and I don't know whether that makes a whole lot of sense, but I think it's true that here in the U.S., every year the culture gets more and more hostile.
01:26And I don't mean hostile like angry, it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read or to look at a piece of art for an hour or to listen to a piece of music that's complicated and that takes work to understand.
01:44Because, well, there are a lot of reasons, but particularly now in computer and Internet culture, everything is so fast and the faster things go, the more we feed that part of ourselves but don't feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet, you know, that can live without any kind of stimulation, I don't know.
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