The author Flannery O’Connor once said, “I am always highly irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it is very shocking to the system.” While writing, she said, she would lose hair and see her teeth decay. It was incredibly intense for her—not just emotionally, but physically.
Although O’Connor was talking about writing here, this idea seems to apply to reading as well—in fact, it might apply to any sort of art we enjoy. We often think of reading, movies, or television as an escape. In some way, they let us avoid normal life. They get us away from what’s real.
We might use media just as a way to shut down. Watching TV is an opportunity to be totally thoughtless for an hour. After a stressful day, turning your brain off can seem like the best thing imaginable.
But we’re missing something if we just treat art as a way to turn our brains off. If we don’t look for anything but an escape, are we really getting the most out of our leisure time?
When we try to turn our brains off and rest, we’re often responding to a real need: A need for rest. Humans aren’t machines: We can’t simply work nonstop. We have a natural appetite for rest and this is simply how we’ve learned to recover from a day of work.
A unique part of TV is how it lets a viewer engage with it without paying any real attention. It’s easy to watch TV while holding a conversation or scrolling on your phone or really doing whatever you’d like. It’s hard to do the same thing reading a book or watching a movie in a theater: A book literally requires your attention. A theater won’t allow you to talk throughout the whole movie. There might be “passive” ways to enjoy books or movies, but it’s clear that TV is uniquely suited for inattentive viewing.
And for as bad as TV can get, it’s no match for the short attention span of smartphones. A smartphone offers endless choices at every moment. None of them ask for more than a minute or two of your time. It’s almost impossible to spend more than a few minutes focused on anything on your phone.
This kind of rest might respond to a real need. This is one way to recover from the stress and difficulty of a hard day. But this is often the only kind of rest we give ourselves. We become totally passive. And, in the process, we miss out on another appetite: One that can only be fed by activity.
Two Appetites for Art
David Foster Wallace once said in an interview, “When you feel like the purpose of your life is to gratify yourself, there’s this other part of you that’s almost hungry for silence and quiet and thinking about the same thing for half an hour instead of thirty seconds that doesn’t get fed at all.”
When we think about our relationship to art, it’s easy to think about the first part. We do this because it’s fun and because it feels good. But this means we’re only feeding one part of ourselves. We satisfy that appetite for thoughtless consumption, but we don’t satisfy that appetite for something deeper.
Wallace went on to say, “Everything is so fast, and the faster things go, the more we feed that part of ourselves, but don’t feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet.” Though he was speaking in the 90’s, well before our current age of media, it’s obvious how relevant this is today. We’re in a world where there’s absolutely no need to be bored. Everything is going at full speed all the time.
When everything seems shallow, it might be because we’re never digging deeper than the surface. Finding a real understanding of something—a book, a craft, a movie, or whatever—necessarily takes time. We are encouraged to never spend more than a few moments on anything.
It’s easy for this view of the world to start invading everything in life. If the point of life is just to feel good and have fun, there’s little meaning to anything other than what satisfaction it can offer and how fast. It doesn’t matter what’s below the surface if we never look for it.
There is something in us that longs for more than just shallow fun. We want something more than just temporary good feelings or distractions. We don’t just want to be passive. We want to live actively, no matter what we’re doing.
We have a capacity for thinking deeply about things. We have a capacity to appreciate silence and focus. Many of us might feel like we’re not capable of this. But, too often, we’re simply out of practice. We don’t take the time to feed that other part of us, and in time, only the impatient appetite for fun will grow.
We need to feed this other part of us somehow. What can we do to satisfy this need? What do we want to do to meet that need for quiet?
Seeking Focus
At its most basic, this is a desire for focus. We want to find an opportunity to think deeply. We want to dig into one thing instead of jumping from one to the other. Even if we don’t realize it, there’s a constant desire for this: We always want to find something worth devoting ourselves to.
In art, this might simply mean taking a more intentional approach to how we read or watch things. Instead of binging or jumping from series to series, take the time to reflect on one thing. Try to ask yourself questions; slow down and return to different parts of a piece.
One of the beautiful things about reading is how it necessarily demands this focus. It’s difficult to read without devoting yourself to a book. In the end, it’s up to you to interpret and understand everything. If you refuse to give a book your full attention, you cannot get much of anything out of it.
But it’s still possible to enjoy TV, movies, music, and more with that same level of focus. They allow for a passive approach, but they don’t require it. There is a more active way to understand these things: It just demands work.
Most importantly, this demands that you challenge yourself. Passive consumption is the path of least resistance. The easiest thing to do will always be to pay no attention to something. It’s easier to distract ourselves than to put in the work to understand anything serious.
We need to find a daily opportunity to exercise this focus. Even if it’s just for half an hour, find the time to think deeply about one single thing. Don’t leave to do something else and try to devote yourself briefly to thinking about just one thing. If we lose this focus, we lose something that’s fundamental to our humanity.
James Joyce once wrote, “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.” To put that in simpler terms, if we devote our full focus to anything, we’ll find the truth of everything within it. Within everything beautiful and real, all the truth in the world can be found.