When I was a boy, this was my reading chair*. It was big enough and I was small enough for me to prop my legs up, feet on the edge of the seat and knees leaning against the arms, and get lost in a book. I read for hours and hours in this chair, ignoring the breeze calling me to play at the beach or the temple banyan, ignoring whatever my boring parents were doing, ignoring my brothers and sisters.

This chair has survived the years, and is presently in our guest bedroom, where I am typing this because the weather has turned stinking hot and this bedroom has the only air conditioner (we value our guests' comforts more than we do our own). And as I write this, I'm not only writing this, but also intermittently checking email, or looking up the Internet surf report (small to tiny, or flattus maximus as we literate surfers say), or replying to text messages from my son who is in the room right next to me asking me if he can go play with friends.

In short, my life is becoming fractalized. Broken down into jagged segments. Sharp discontinuous turns. And there goes my cell phone text message again. I could keep writing this post, but….

Of course not. I had to read. A friend asking if there was any surf my way. Flattus maximus, dude.

In way, we're retreating to our monkey roots. Have you ever watched a troop of monkeys? They get bored and distracted about as quickly as kids at church. That sort of micro-attention span really is our natural state, I think, and our current technology is allowing us to revert back to it. The ability to sit down and concentrate for hours at a time is a trait we acquired when technology was the Slow Stuff, like long wagon rides and, or even before the invention of the wheel, lazy evenings around the cave fire with nothing to do but flake off spear points and listen to your cave mate tell the story about saving the hot babe from the saber tooth tiger, about the umpteenth time he's told it, not that you're counting, because you can't count beyond ten.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother writing novels. Which, you know, is one long narrative. Continuous flow of words. If it's hard for me to take the chunk of time to sit down and do the writing, which after is what I do to justify my existence even if it isn't exactly a career that pays my bills, who, these days, really has the time to sit down and do the reading? Get lost in another world and linger there with its characters?

For that matter, when was the last time I the writer was really me the reader, the guy who could sit down in this reading chair and read for hours and hours and hours until some exasperated family member told me it was time for dinner?

I've just tried sitting in the chair with a big fat book, Follet's "World without End." Book without end, more like. The chair is cramped, uncomfortable. And my Instant Messaging chimed…

The solution is simple, though. Reacquire the trait. By simply doing it over and over again. Sit down, start reading, dude. The surf is flattus maximus anyway.


* Image viewable at http://www.novelistinparadise.com/?p=7


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