There are two ways of spreading light; to be The candle or the mirror that reflects it.
- Edith Wharton
New Moon Slow Reflections
Using The New Moon To Get You To Write A Slow Letter & Read A Slow Book- In other words, reflect
Read, write and reflect. Take a little time to sit down and write a letter by hand and think about what you want to say. End of year musings, moonstruck passion, artistic inspiration, a piece of your soul that takes time, just do it. Slow writing and reading with a little time creates impressions that are reflective and sincere. The New Moon is here, it's the winter Solstice and we are cyclical creatures. We store great things inside of us and don't take the time to express or articulate, reflect and create. It's cliche to compare the lost art of letter writing and slow novel reading to texts and email. We all know the soul depleting aspects of thinking and communicating solely by quick acronyms and abbreviations. Take up a new art with yourself and say something. How is your handwriting? It's your mark, a very personal part of your history. Dare to take the time to think and express. Who do you know that would appreciate the process of getting a letter in the mail?
On To The Slow Reading
Slow Read
Nietzsche's Musings on Topic
In his preface to Daybreak (1887), German philosopher and philologist Friedrich Nietzsche recommended the practice of slow reading:
It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading:--in the end I also write slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my taste--a malicious taste, perhaps?--no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is "in a hurry." For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow--it is a goldsmith's art and connoisseurship of the world which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento.
But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of "work," that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to "get everything done" at once, including every old or new book:--this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.
