I’ve been working on adding some new practices to my daily schedule. A key thing I added in December – even before the Solstice, much less the official New Year – was to spend about 15 or 20 minutes reading every morning.
The original purpose was to give myself a reason to sit quietly for a few minutes before checking my blood pressure – which I’m keeping a close eye on – but it quickly evolved into something I really wanted to do. And that was probably because of the book I started with: Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time.
I stumbled on that book in a used bookstore in Sebastopol (the one in California, not Crimea) last summer and bought it on impulse. When I started doing the reading back in December, I pulled it out with a couple of other books on much the same impulse, and quickly fell into it.
Rovelli is a physicist, and the book is about the understanding of time by physicists, and yet that doesn’t begin to completely describe it, not to mention that it doesn’t tell anyone what a joy it is to read.
Rovelli is a lyrical writer and a gentle one. He can make statements that might be controversial without issuing a challenge. While I’m reading the English translation of this book (it was translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell), I am quite sure the beautiful and gentle writing is all Rovelli and was there in the Italian original. Rovelli does speak English (and likely several other languages, given the different scientists with whom he has worked), so I imagine he has some idea of what his words should look like when translated.
In doing this reading, I began to keep something of a commonplace book in which I wrote down quotations from the book or, occasionally, my own reaction.
Here are some of quotes that struck me:
Nothing is valid always and everywhere.
[T]he world is nothing but change.
The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.
We are part of a network that goes far beyond the few days of our lives and the few square meters that we tread.
We are more complex than our mental faculties are capable of grasping.
I could go on, but perhaps that is enough to entice others to read this book. Continue reading “A Reading Practice”…
Somewhere fairly recently I was in a conversation with someone (can you tell I cannot for the life of me remember when, or with whom, the conversation occurred?) about the why of writing. The person I was talking with spoke pretty definitively about why writers write, and while her points (I can remember it was a woman I was speaking with, maybe by the time I finish this post I’ll remember her name) were valid, I thought they were also limited. As if she could not imagine reasons to write that were not hers. Which is the crux of why I write. I’m trying to figure out why people do what they do. It’s why I read, too: to understand.