The Owl Has Flown

Sven Birkerts writes an essay called "The Owl Has Flown." In this essay Birkerts' main point is that we, as a society, are so overwhelmed with reading material that we have lost the true meaning to reading. He claims that people in our society read more material with less understanding. He calls this "horizontal engagement" or in another words, extensive reading compared to intensive reading, which he would call "vertical engagement." Birkerts states; "Instead of carrying on the ancient philosophy - attempting to discover the 'truth' of things - we direct our energies to managing information." I believe an analogy could be made of this. Birkerts is saying that our brain has become a 'filing cabinet', used to store multiple, yet meaningless information. He states that we need to use vertical engagement to have a much greater understanding of the material we read. Birkerts also states that gathering or organizing facts is not wisdom. That "wisdom is seeing through facts, a penetration to the underlying laws and patterns." Birkerts also goes on about how we, as a soceity, have lost touch with 'deep time,' which is neccessary for the vertical engagement to take place. "Where time has been commodified, flattened, turned into yet another thing measured, there is no chance that any piece of information can unfold its potential significance. We are destroying this deep time."