Monday, February 16, 2004
(1:57 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Things that take a long time
A colleague and I were discussing the theology of Karl Barth, whose major work, the Church Dogmatics, is over 9000 pages long. He claimed that if you read fifty pages a day, you could read the whole thing in a year. I found a more exact figure for the page number, then did the math -- you can actually do it if you read a little over twenty-five pages a day (slightly under twenty-five if it's a leap year). I think that most any educated person should be able to read twenty-five pages a day in around an hour, and most people do have an hour to give if they look hard enough. So for all those who are thinking of reading the entire Church Dogmatics and don't think you have time -- you do have time, if you spread it out enough. (My colleague must have factored in breaks for weekends and federal holidays.)
Other really long works would probably be the same effect. For instance, In Search of Lost Time is probably less than half the length of Church Dogmatics, so you could read it in six months or so, at a completely reasonable and "doable" rate. (Does anyone have the exact figure? This is important.) You could read the complete Kant, the complete Shakespeare -- really, any massive body of work that "every educated person should know" -- in a reasonable amount of time if you paced yourself. Instead of watching the back-to-back "Full House" re-runs every night, break out Proust. It's that simple.
Only if you want to read Proust, though. If you want to watch the complete "Full House," then watching the back-to-back re-runs every night is probably the best way to go.
Now, of course, you're going to wonder how I'm applying this "slow and steady" logic in my own life. In my case, it's a team effort. Justin and I have determined that if we spent thirty minutes to an hour each day, working together, we can finish Contra III: The Alien Wars, at least on the easy level.
UPDATE: Justin and I did finish that game; now, on to the normal level.
Karl Barth is curing me of my aversion to reading theology -- although what I might be enjoying as I read (and tediously write an abstract) of portions of his Epistle to the Romans is not so much theology as Karl Barth himself. He was a truly brilliant man, with a powerful writing style and a penetrating intellect. I've been reading a lot about politically motivated dilletantism over at John and Belle's (okay, fine -- I can admit that it happens sometimes; I'll leave it to Chun to defend the MLA to the death), and one thing you can say for Barth was that he was never a dilletante. Deleuze once said that the best thing the student revolutionaries could do for the cause was to finish their dissertations, and that's exactly the approach Barth took. He took his intellectual enterprise seriously precisely because he took his politics so seriously.
