If philosophy involves the patience of ‘sitting with’ the world, then Heidegger is right to urge us to dwell, to stop, to reflect—to slow down. The slow and contemplative attitude that Virginia Woolf urges us towards, serves, too, to remind us to steep ourselves in the long and complicated process that reading ought to be. In this sense, slow reading would not simply mean always reading slowly, but would, rather, involve a preparedness to return time and time again to what we read. To attend to reading. We must, Woolf claims, ‘wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from a rose, or fall asleep.’ In the process of this slow and careful waiting (or attention) our dwelling with the world and with what we read returns. ‘Then suddenly without our willing it, for it is that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book will return, but differently.’ Slow reading is, then, this waiting, this attention, this dwelling that allows the world (and the book) to return to us differently—as thing, Heidegger would say, rather than as resource.
Michelle Boulous Walker, Slow Philosophy: Reading Against the Institution (via nemophilies)
countervisuality 