Three velocities

Three velocities: that of writing, that of reading, and that of thinking through the written.

The physical activity of writing is fast enough. P. B. Shelley wrote that ‘when composition begins, inspiration is already in decline’ but he, of course, had to write with a quill regularly dipped and re-dipped into a pot of ink. Scratching the words into hand-made paper. A ballpoint pen over industrially produced paper flows faster, the accustomed fingers over a keyboard even more so. With the help of muscle memory each letter appears on the page before it is shaped in the mind. Not to mention advances in speech recognition technology. Nonetheless, the possibility that no matter how fast, the speed of turning thought into type will lag behind the flash of inspiration remains.

Learning to read begins letter by letter. The letters shaped by the mouth, clustered into phonemes. It proceeds word by word, sentence by sentence, soon enough skimming the page, scrolling, browsing, scanning for keywords. But a reading that outspeeds the individual letters on the page is not one that recaptures the pace of inspiration, rather its opposite. The faster you read, the less is being read.

But to think through the something that you will write, or that which has been written before you, has nothing to do with the mechanics of characters on a page. To write on the written is to remember this differential.