But it is a thousand times more difficult to learn to read slowly. There are no devices that would help with this.

We have already talked about what it means to comprehend the text of a textbook and how difficult it is.

It is even more difficult to read fiction, because writers and poets try (this is their purpose) to convey a meaning that a scientist is unable to convey. A scientist can find, put into a concept and convey to the reader an exact and only accurate meaning. A scholar cannot allow any of his words to be interpreted in two or more ways, otherwise he will not be a scholar. If he starts saying something vague, readers will turn away from him, say, "There's no science here," and he'll lose his credibility. Science always deals with precise meanings.

But in real life, there is very little or almost no exactness. In life, everything is indefinite, polysemantic, unclearly outlined. To give to the vague images of life at least a certain precision and definiteness, so that these images can be expressed in words — this is what poets and writers struggle with, this is their unspeakable suffering. They strive for exact precision where there can be no exactness, and they know that there can be none, and yet they dream of it and strive for it as if it were an unattainable beauty.

Discoveries are made by both the scientist and the writer. A fiction book in which there are no discoveries is as invaluable and insignificant as a book by a scientist in which there are no discoveries. The more new, the more discoveries and the more significant the eyes, the more valuable the book, the more readers it will have and the longer it will be read. There have always been people like Don Quixote, even before Cervantes. But Cervantes made a discovery: he singled out the type of such people, outlined them, presented them in all their depth, and called his discovery Don Quixote. And now, when we meet such an idealist dreamer, a selflessly bold but uncalculating fighter, we take advantage of Cervantes's discovery and say of man: "This is Don Quixote." No words, no concepts can express what we want to say. Whole pages of precise definitions will not convey all the meaning and our attitude to the phenomenon contained in the word "Don Quixote". There are many such examples. Say about a person "fruitless dreamer" – your interlocutor will require many, many explanations. Say: "This is Manilov" and you will be understood immediately.

Classics, we repeat, are classics because they contain significant discoveries that mankind uses.

The word of a scientist, a scientific article and a textbook must be comprehended, put into them their own meaning, which exactly coincides with the thought of the scientist.

In the image created by a writer or poet, it is necessary to put not only meaning, but also feeling. The writer must sympathize, the character must be felt.

In a fiction book, in addition to the direct meaning of words, there is always some additional meaning or several meanings. A work of art is always multifaceted. For several centuries, critics, psychologists, directors, actors have been trying to understand and explain Hamlet, each offering their own version, supporting it with quotes from Shakespeare. And everyone is right in their own way! If you put all these Hamlets together, they will probably fight with each other, so different are they. But all these understandings and interpretations are contained in one and the same tragedy of Shakespeare.

A scientific book educates, processes, trains the mind; artistic — both mind and feelings. A person brought up only on scientific books develops mental deafness. Up to a certain low level, he can work in science, especially in a scientific team, and quite fruitfully. But he will never become a significant scientist, because science requires not only a culture of thought, but also an equally thorough culture of feeling.

No, reading quickly is the same as not reading. With quick reading, you can grasp the thread of the plot, imagine the characters in general terms; You can, on occasion, retell the book - it turns out that you have read it. But there can be no talk of the main thing for which fiction books are read – there can be no talk of sympathy for the characters, of the culture of feelings. A person will devour a hundred books and become even less cultured than he was before he started reading, because he will get used to reading without thinking or worrying.

As for the great people who really read very quickly, then, firstly, they had genius abilities. And secondly, by the nature of their work, they had to look through a huge number of books. Naturally, they have trained themselves to read very quickly. But it is unlikely that Goethe, when he reread Molière every spring, hardly read it at a speed of two thousand words per minute. Béranger, trying to feel the style of Racine's tragedies, to understand and adopt it, tried to slow down the reading and for this he rewrote the tragedies several times.

Do not succumb to reports that in our century the amount of information has increased dramatically and a person cannot cope with it. No matter how much information grows, the human brain can process it just as much as it can. In some twelfth or thirteenth century, the same mountains of books lay before the scholastic scholar as before the present one. In youth, because of a lack of experience, and in old age, because of an overabundance of experience, a person has read and will always read slowly.

Of course, slow and attentive reading, with stops, returns, reflections, has nothing in common with poor reading technique, when all mental strength is spent on folding letters and syllables. Some children read with difficulty until the seventh or eighth grade. You should not be ashamed of this, you just need to pay attention to your deficiency and, without hesitation, learn to read. Without completely free reading, there can be no development.