Why we read slowly

Most of the books on the society's first shelf are short. As a Man Thinketh can be read in a single evening. Feeling Is the Secret runs to four chapters. It is tempting to read them the way they are often passed around — quickly, for the lines that sound true, and then on to the next.

NOESIS reads them the other way. A circle spends a month on one book, with a milestone each week. That is not because the books are difficult. It is because their claims are large, and a large claim deserves time.

What slowness makes possible

Read slowly and you begin to notice what an author is assuming. Allen says that circumstance does not make a person but reveals them. On a first reading that is encouraging. On a third, set against an ordinary week in this city, it raises questions he does not answer — about luck, about injustice, about what we owe each other when circumstance is cruel.

Read slowly and you can test an idea before you adopt it. A circle ends each week with something to try, and begins the next with what happened. A book about the power of thought earns its place by what it does to a reader, not by how it sounds.

Read slowly and you read with other people. The member who disagrees with you is the most useful person in the room, and a month gives a disagreement time to become a conversation.

Older company

We set the new-thought writers beside older books that asked the same questions with more patience. Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations as private reminders to himself. Epictetus opens the Enchiridion by dividing the world into what is up to us and what is not. Augustine took thirteen books to tell the story of a restless heart in his Confessions. Beside them, the quick promises of the success literature either deepen or fall away. Both outcomes are worth knowing.

How to begin

You do not need to be a fast reader, or a well-read one. You need a book, a pencil and an hour or two a week. Choose a book from the Library, mark it as Reading, and come to a circle. Bring the sentence that annoyed you most. That is usually where the conversation starts.