On Slow Reading

Why philology is a discipline of patience.

Nietzsche, himself a trained philologist, defined the craft as the art of reading slowly. The definition holds. A text in a dead language cannot be skimmed; every form must be weighed, every ambiguity noticed before it can be resolved.

This is not an inefficiency to be optimized away. The slowness is the method. What the fast reader takes as given — that this verb is past tense, that this pronoun refers to that noun — the philologist must earn. And in the earning, the text opens.

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