Some Aphorisms
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Some Aphorisms
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1. Reading slowly reveals the hidden dimensions of a text.
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2. The essential thing is freedom. A people cannot be great or fulfilled without freedom. A literature cannot be great without it either.
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3. The basic prerequisite for literature is freedom. The first freedom is mental freedom.
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4. It is possible to be free in the world and unfree in your head.
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5. The most striking thing about great literature is the strength of freedom that flows through its pages.
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6. Great literature is almost always indirect.
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7. We go to literature for that which speaks to us in time and outside of time.
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8. It is our responsibility to illuminate the strange corners of what it is to be human.
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9. If subject were the most important thing, we would not need literature. History would be sufficient. Journalism would be enough.
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10. It is its art, rather than its subject, which makes a work always mysteriously relevant to us. The subject is the body and the art is the spirit of a work. The art is the mysterious animating element without which a work cannot live. And if the work does not live its relevance will in time fade. It is its art alone which keeps a work alive through the long ages.
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11. Launch the Slow Reading movement throughout the world. We do everything fast. We read fast. We think fast. We ought to read more slowly. Reading slowly we see what is there and not there. Reading slowly is a revelation. It is an immersion. It turns a book into a world. Bad writing is never more clearly revealed than with slow reading. Great writing is never more nourishing than when read slowly. It is the closest thing to entering the genius of creativity itself, living in its temple.
Because we read too fast we misunderstand too quickly. Slow Reading restores sanity to a world where we grasp less than we hear, take in less than we are told, and miss the meaning of our most significant experiences. Slow Reading is a metaphorical beginning of a journey towards a richer receptivity of all the dimensions of life. [End Page 1042]
This does not mean that one cannot read fast, or think fast, or run fast when one wants to. It is just that with things one values, the books one wants to get the most from, one elects to read them slowly. It is an orientation towards greater nourishment, deeper understanding. To grasp one good book well is better than grasping five good books vaguely.
Reading is analogous to writing.
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12. The genius of inner freedom. [End Page 1043]
BEN OKRI—novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and essayist—was born in Minna, Nigeria, but spent his early years in London, while his father studied law. Okri later returned to the UK to study at the University of Essex. He is author of more than eighteen books, including Incidents at the Shrine, The Famished Road (winner of the Booker Prize), An African Elegy, In Arcadia, Starbook, Tales of Freedom, and The Age of Magic. He has also received such literary prizes and awards as the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Booker Prize for Fiction, the Chianti Ruffino-Antico Fattore International Literary Prize, the Premio Grinzane Cavour, and the Premio Palmi. From 1991 to 1993, he was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge University, in 1987 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2001 he was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire). In addition to being a member of the board of the Royal National Theatre, he is also a Vice President of the English Centre of International PEN. He lives in London.
