Reading this, I am trying to figure out how to ‘restore the positive perception of certain almost lost qualities’ that Manguel describes.  That said, I sense that while we are sometimes readily seduced by the ‘vaunted virtues of the quick and easy’, many relish the deep satisfaction that can come from things which are necessarily slow and difficult to achieve.

‘As our capacity to store experience increases, so does our need to develop keener, deeper ways of reading the encrypted stories.  For this we need to leave aside the vaunted virtues of the quick and easy, and restore the positive perception of certain almost lost qualities: depth of reflection, slowness of advancement, difficulty of undertakings.’

Source: Alberto Manguel, The City of Words, CBC Massey Lecture Series (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2007), p. 68-69

Photo credit: Karl Fredrickson, unsplash.com