I read slowly. Very. Testudinally (say that five times fast).

I am talking reading here, not scanning. I can scan fast – and do, scrolling the news, emails, jokes, the latest – writing that isn’t writing but pinging – gotcha! – like a spitball from across the classroom. Its style is it hasn’t got any, only aim. Call it info-hissing. Few miscreants are more irksome than info-hissers who aspire to be writers, introducing into their Strunked-and-Whitened dispatches gratuitous locutions that retard information transmission. I remember shuddering, in my newspaper editor days (yes, I’m that old), whenever a bright-eyed applicant for reporter declared their ambition to be “a writer.” The best journalism is non-written – stick to the facts, ma’am – writing so spare and bland it seems to snigger at language’s inestimable might. If this paragraph feels over-written, it’s meant to, to italicize my point. Writing’s no more about its subject than a painting or a song: it’s about its maker, straining through this medium to expose a self. AI is a champion info-hisser, having no self to share: eventually, it will supplant all breathing info-hissers, as cleaner and more efficient: “disintermediate” is the fancy verb, a neologism of my span. Disintermediated is roughly synonymous with obsoleted, superseded, cashiered, retired, pushed out to pasture with your gold watch (remember watches – or pastures?). Progress chews up people and digests us into – you get the picture. Art endeavors to prevent or retard this mutation. Art presumes to outlast breath – ars longa, vita brevis – and so it may, once in a blue moon.

Writing I read on paper, not a screen, pen poised above the page, tense as a flyswatter, to capture phrases, gather them for future use, if not as ingredients, as stimulant -- or simply encouragement: “Why can’t you make such magic, Carll?”  I read not for the story or thought – stories and thoughts are endless, a dime a dozen – but for the soul behind the syllables, which, if worth my while, is vivid and strange. The ablest writers – or makers in any medium – are mysteriously, exhaustingly sui generis, one of a kind, and thus irreplaceable. Only Mozart can be Mozart, Dickens Dickens, Caravaggio Caravaggio, etc.

Younger I yearned to read fast. President Kennedy, the brochure claimed, was a graduate of Evelyn Wood Speed Reading, so I signed up too, scoring boffo grades, tearing through Huckleberry Finn in under two hours without cracking a smile. Only gradually, over the next several decades, did I come to view speed-reading as violation, heresy, desecration, pissing on the high altar of Meaning. Info-hissing one might gulp at any rate, the faster the better, but writing, real writing, like fine cooking, was made to be savored, the slower the better, each element an elegance, contributing to the whole. Wolfing Huckleberry Finn as if in a hotdog-eating contest one deserved indigestion.

Folks wonder if writing will survive or be superseded by AI. Yes, writing will – and info-hissing, as a human occupation, won’t. Writing will, as song, painting, dance and drama will, for our souls, swollen with loveliness and loneliness, need such inconvenient conduits to companionable kin. The ablest writers snag me like peddlers in the souk to pause, peruse, ponder, purchase perhaps once we’re cozy. They seduce – imploringly – for without me they must vanish into oblivion. I am their lifeguard on my tall chair keeping them from drowning. You are mine.

America is addicted to speed, efficiency, acquisition: the more, the more! A card-carrying American, I embodied its attitudes: give me more! Now, approaching the end of my adventure, I crave less and less, no polymath but paramour, affianced to a few.