I read slowly. But often not slowly enough.

I’m not talking about browsing. Browsing is sluicing information into the brain lickety-split, the quicker the better. To dawdle browsing is to squander time.

I’m talking about reading as listening – to what words are trying to say; reading as an encounter with another living being whose individuality interests you; reading as tryst.

As a student I yearned to read faster. How otherwise master the world’s wealth of words? One summer I enlisted in a speed-reading class. I aced it. My instructor high-fived me (or whatever the equivalent was back then). I read Huckleberry Finn in under two hours – without cracking a smile. Who had time to smile? JFK speed-read a dozen newspapers a day, we were told. (Imagine having a president who read!)

Back then, we believed in speed, efficiency, progress. “Better things for better living.” Pace was essential to America’s genius. The quicker the better.

In every sphere of activity we accelerated – ten-fold, a hundred-fold – wow. Then some started asking where we were hurtling. Thoreau had asked that question way back when. “Why should we live with such hurry,” he wrote, “and waste of life?” And: “It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” And (hilariously): “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” (Thoreau is too seldom lauded as a laugh-out-loud comedian.)

In the 1980’s – in Rome, predictably – the Slow Food movement commenced, advocating tasting, chewing, swallowing, understanding the ingredients we ingest. My daughter Becca, an elegant, insightful, and often hilarious writer (visit her at fresh dirt), promotes an Eat Local month for her region, where everything on one’s plate must be grown locally. (A few exceptions are permitted – coffee, say, or pepper, or olive oil – thank goodness.)

How about a Slow Prose and Read Local movement, where we train ourselves to listen, not just gobble?

Prose is often mistaken for a dray horse, hauling meaning. It is that: prose without discernible direction offers few delights. But meaning is only its obvious cargo. What good prose lavishes on us, if it’s any good, is the personality, attitude, style, politics, aspiration of the person who produced it. How we speak is who we are. Our choice of words, syntax, rhetorical tactics reveals as much of us or more than our statements. Reading colorless prose is like making love to a mannequin.

Align the prose of, say, Francis Bacon, Swift, Dr. Johnson, Jane Austen, Thoreau, Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Orwell, E.B. White, James Baldwin, Didion to name a few, and note what you learn from the way they talk. Can’t you almost feel them in the room beside you? Love or loathe them, they’ve made themselves real. Whoosh past them and they’re faceless.

Is this taught? It wasn’t to me. I was taught to write grammatically, accurately, concisely, never vividly, violently, variously; to say what I meant and shut up. That’s not a bad place to start – but it’s a drab place to end up. What’s worth reading is worth rereading – and then again. Press your stethoscope to the book and hear its heart.

Reading taught me to write. Whose prose enticed? (Miss Austen’s! Thoreau’s!) Why? Whose made me shudder? (Bacon! Hemingway!) What suited the tastes of my hearers and tempo of our time? Which of my own productions did I smile to reread? Try again.