Reading

The more I read the less I comprehend. The comprehension barrier is a product of two recent developments. First, I simply can no longer understand what I am reading. Each page with its forty to fifty sentences has become a pit of snakes – squirming, black snakes whose heads are indistinguishable from their tails. Staring at the tangle, I get the feeling that there is some horrible, elusive meaning, which I will never quite grasp within each page.

Second, I am being suffocated by words. After about twenty pages of reading, my throat constricts and a rush of nausea overwhelms me. Why? It could be a psychosomatic process linked by some secret conditioning to eye squinting. However, this seems highly unlikely. My most recent hypothesis is that these psychosomatic reactions are a product of a growing unconscious understanding of the essence of text. Given that this unconscious knowledge is producing these strange effects, it may be better that my growing knowledge of text remain unconscious. Thus, ultimately, the psychosomatic prevetion of any conscious knowledge of text is not such a bad thing.