Somebody introduced the word hesychasm, purely to make the rest of us feel inadequate & ill-educated.
I finally succumbed & looked it up. Not after all very interesting, not as much as the fact that St Augustine found it necessary to remark upon Ambrose’s strange habit of reading without saying anything.
I can remember the day one of our primary school teachers said that, now everybody in the class could read fluently & silently to themselves, we should concentrate on, & practice, practice, to get up as much speed as we could. The faster you read, the more you could learn.
He said that in order to read fast it was important, not just not to move your lips, but not even to say the words to yourself in your head.
I tried dutifully to read by simply staring at the page; I might just as well have been staring vacantly into space.
By the end of the week I had given up all pretence of trying to read this way.
And yet I don’t read by saying the words to myself – in fact the definition of really good writing, in my book, is that you are not even conscious of reading at all. There seems to be a direct connection from the author’s neurons.
It is just the act of deliberately not talking to yourself which sabotages the process.
Links
THE SILENT READERS
The Hesychast system
Related post
Keep your nose out of it
THE SILENT READERS
The Hesychast system
Related post
Keep your nose out of it
