Today we are swamped with information on the internet, in the newspapers, on the radio, so that increasingly we skim the surface as we read, otherwise we would be surfeited. But we also need to make it a practice to read certain texts slowly, to take them for a walk, as it were, so that the words sink deep into us. I remember Robert Frost saying how the words of certain great poems had meant much to him, such as the line from a Shakespeare sonnet, ‘He that has power to hurt and will do none’. That, he said, had meant a great deal to him. Which is why it is a helpful practice, apart from our daily meditation, to read such a text, memorise it, and carry it with us as we go about our daily tasks.
