The treatment? 100 pages of literature a day!

Part of going back to school without actually going to a school with other students or an instructor is figuring out the discipline necessary to carry it off so that one actually learns something, so that one deals with a body of material.  That can be difficult in a busy, exhausting life.

So I have set myself the task of trying to read 100 pages of literature a day until I get through the books I would like to read.  One of the books is A Fairly Tale by Jonas T. Bengtsson.  It's a Danish work in translation. 

For some, 100 pages a day would be nothing.  For me, it is challenge, but it is something I can do.  I think I need to.  It is a treatment of sorts.

What's the malady?  Mental atrophy, so it's like exercise.  Intellectual malnourishment, so it's like food.  Illness of expression, so it's like medicine. 

I consume so many words through social media every day that are hastily thrown together, that are incompletely constructed, that are formulaic in their captivity to ideology (left and right) that I need to spend time with words that carry the weight of time, that are carefully constructed, that lead to humane but surprising places to counter what is becoming too common. 

Yes, literature will be a diversion.  Yes, it will also make me a better writer and speaker.  And it will certainly make me a more critical consumer of words and ideas.  But the adventure of it is that I actually don't know where all this reading will lead and who I may become inside or out because of it.

In the final 100 pages of The Plague by Albert Camus that I read tonight, I never expected to read some of the things he says in those passages, nor did I expect to have the reflections that resulted.  And now I'm someone slightly different.