Reading response 3

Sven Birkerts explains in his essay “The Owl Has Flown,” that reading is losing its value. It is lacking Wisdom, Resonance, and Depth, all of which are the key to good reading. The title “The Owl Has Flown” explains the theme of his essay in that the owl represents Wisdom, Resonance, and Depth, and the fact that it has flown shows that reading lacking those structures.

“We are experiencing in our times a loss of depth---a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth. A sense of the deep and natural connectedness of things is a function of vertical consciousness. Its apotheosis is what was once called wisdom. Wisdom: the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life. But swamped by data, and in thrall to the technologies that manipulate it, we no longer think in these larger and necessarily more imprecise terms,” Birkerts proclaims.

This passage is about Depth and wisdom specifically, and how we are at “a loss” of them. Birkerts talks about “Vertical consciousness”. He says vertical consciousness is, “a sense of the deep and natural connectedness of things.” What Birkerts means by that is, vertical consciousness is when you analyze and truly understand something. So you learn as much as there is to know about a specific thing. Whereas horizontal consciousness is when you know a little bit about a wide variety of things. In these times, there is much more to read than there was back in the day. So, because there was only certain things to read back then, people would re-read things over and over and understand them better each time. However, now that there are so many more books, people read more and don’t go in depth with each one, but rather skim through them. This passage also talks about wisdom. Birkerts states wisdom is “the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life.” He is saying that wisdom is not knowing facts that are told to you, but it is knowing from experiences that you have during your life. You will learn more from having a bad experience than you will from hearing about a bad experience. When you experience the emotion it really sticks with you and you learn from it. If it is a good feeling, you would learn that you like that feeling and find out how to feel it again. Or if the feeling was bad, you will know not to do whatever it was that caused the bad feeling and figure out how to change it. The way words are placed and chosen is very important. A single word can change the meaning of the whole sentence. Every single word is just as important as the next. Birkerts essay is about how the quality of reading is decreasing nowadays. However, Clive Thompson argues how writing is improving nowadays.