Book ADD

Andrew mocks me for my book ADD.

I, on the other hand, have no qualms with the fact that I read 5 books at a time, lamenting that I don’t have more hands to hold them with. But I finish always finish them. For the most part anyway. Perhaps my multiple book habit is due to a short attention span, a nurture complex that has forced me to desire much more than I need, (or simply the fact that I can’t read). Who knows? I just know I have always been like this.

I can see only one negative aspect to the inability to focus exclusively on one text. It translates to my other pursuits. I fear that I rarely get so involved in something that I lose all track of time and civilization and emerge to find I have created a masterpiece. My personal triumphs often involve the use of ambient music, tea drinking, and pacing, a lot of pacing. For example, I have never sat down at a computer and finished an essay in one intense fell / fowlie swoop. Or painted a large canvas without taking numerous breaks to gain perspective, inspiration, eat dry ribs, sip on a 40 ...

I think I speak for a lot of other young urban adults when I say all this. Look at the internet, look at the increasing presence of blog culture – short, captivating articles with fun pictures and captions. This is our world. This is our literacy. Our contemporary hieroglyphics are entirely ephemeral, floating in cyberspace for the lifespan of our computers. Do we have any substance? Maybe our substance was lost a long time ago with the birth of the computer, the looming death of the written word, our ever shortening attention spans.

I can be sure about one thing, though. The constant interests in my life that comprise my personality, influenced by Toronto, university, friends, travel ... every one of them points me back to the earth. I write about the environment because it calls me. I don’t know a lot about it yet, in fact, the more I read the more mystifying it becomes (perhaps this is because I can never focus on just one book at a time). But I want to learn everything. I want to know how to resolve the gap between the people we once were, and the people we have become – products of a civilization that have no concept of true value. Everything in my life points me back to this.