Reading Response--The Owl Has Flown

Take It Easy (Love Nothing)

Sven Birkerts exclaims in his essay, “The Owl Has Flown,” that reading is not recognizable to what it once was. Because of our pace of life, the soul of reading has been overtaken by the busyness of modern life. Birkerts considers the shift from vertical reading (intensive reading that becomes ‘impressed on one’s consciousness’) to horizontal reading (extensive reading as a fast preview with more focus on the ‘what’s next’) too wide of a gap to bridge. He believes depth is lost with intensive reading and that technology is a culprit behind it.

“Wisdom: the knowing not of facts but of truths about human nature and the processes of life. But swamped by data, and in thrall of the technologies that manipulate it, we no longer think in these larger and necessarily more imprecise terms….Indeed, we tend to act embarrassed around those once-freighted terms—truth, meaning, soul, destiny…We suspect the people who use such words of being soft and nostalgic. We prefer the deflating one-liner that reassures us that nothing need be taken that seriously; we inhale the atmosphere of irony.”

Birkerts is saying that wisdom is a deeper look into the words we read. Wisdom is what is gained from intensive reading. However technology brings more precise definites to the table. Wisdom is ruled out by solid, cold facts. The present reality of words like truth, meaning, soul, and destiny once used to find comfort and restore peace are weighted by new horizontal terms, giving it only the remembrance of yesteryear. In the modern view of old concepts, we are able to brush ‘someone else’s’ ideas away to create our own, making our own truth and meaning as shallow as we want. Regardless of true wisdom, which is seeing truth behind facts, we are settling for facts with the supportive source of technology.

The idea of wisdom in Birkerts’ essay sets a solid reference point for the rest of his ideas to funnel down. From wisdom he is able to connect resonance and resonance to deep time which is the single fiber of his point. Reading has become so manufactured to be a brief fix in our society, it turns into another thing measured by time, not allowing the art and capacity of the words to fill our minds. Depth becomes the only survivor because it doesn’t exist in the same realm as time. It is important to understand that wisdom is seen as a thing of the past, but also that its return would be the key to resurrect vertical engagement. Not taking fact as truth, but relating the immediate (facts) to something larger is what Birkerts suggests, to find one’s soul.

Birkerts dissection of the need for restoration in modern reading challenges the ideas put in place by Clive Thompson’s, “The New Literacy.” Thompson claims that the shift in language and writing is fueled by technology and implementing a new form of literacy—a horizontal type of writing for extensive reading. Birkerts would suggest that technologies like Twitter which allows short, curt updates on any desirable thing to be seen and then disposed of does nothing for enhancing wisdom. Thompson believes the opposite, that the opportunities technology provides enhances creativity and writing skills in today’s literate society.