Why Introverts Love Books That Are Hard to Read (There Is a Greek Word for It)

#chalepatakala #spinoza #slowreading #introvert #books #introvertlife A slow essay for anyone who has looked at the same six lines for ten minutes, and quietly wondered whether everyone else is simply faster. If you are looking for speed-reading tricks or a ranked list of the hardest books ever written, this is not that video. This one is about why some minds are drawn to difficult books, and why going slowly is not the same as falling behind. The last sentence of Baruch Spinoza's Ethics is eight words long in Latin: all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. He earned his living grinding lenses, turned down a professorship to keep his freedom to think, and never saw his book in print. We open an old Greek proverb that Plato loved, chalepa ta kala, beautiful things are difficult. We sit in Spinoza's rented room, follow a young Abraham Lincoln through the six books of Euclid, and stay with Malcolm X in a prison cell as he copies an entire dictionary by hand until difficult books finally open to him. Then the research, honestly: Robert Bjork's desirable difficulties, a famous font study that did not survive replication, and Maryanne Wolf's worry about deep reading. With a fair word about the wrong kind of difficulty, about snobbery, and about readers for whom one paragraph a day is already a stretch. THREE WAYS TO KEEP A HARD BOOK IN YOUR LIFE 1. Aim to continue, not to finish: a page a day is enough 2. Stay in the not-knowing for a while, as Keats put it 3. Keep a dictionary nearby SOURCES Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Part 5, final scholium (Opera Posthuma, 1677) Spinoza's letter declining the chair at Heidelberg (1673) Plato, Hippias Major and Republic, on the proverb "chalepa ta kala" Abraham Lincoln, autobiographical sketch (1860) Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) Robert Bjork, "Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings" (1994) Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan, "Fortune favors the bold (and the italicized)", Cognition (2011) Ralf Rummer, Judith Schweppe and Anne Schwede, "Fortune is fickle: null-effects of disfluency on learning outcomes", Metacognition and Learning (2016) Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018) Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read a Book?" (1926) John Keats, letter to his brothers George and Tom (December 1817) A NOTE ON THE WORD Chalepa ta kala (roughly kha-LEH-pa ta ka-LA) is an ancient Greek proverb, already called old in Plato's time: beautiful things are difficult. The Greek kala means more than beautiful. It also means noble, fine and excellent, everything truly worth having. Plato ends his dialogue Hippias Major with it, after Socrates fails to define beauty and admits that this is the one thing he has learned. TELL ME What is the hardest book you have ever finished, or the one you are still slowly working through? Tell me how far in you are. This channel makes slow essays about reading, learning and the quiet life of the mind. New ones regularly. Subscribe if that is what you are here for. #malcolmx #abrahamlincoln #johnkeats #virginiawoolf #deepreading #philosophy #introvert #videoessay