In praise of difficult books

There is a particular quality to the silence just before dawn, when the machinery of the day has not yet started and the machinery of the night has finally stopped. For a few minutes the world holds its breath, and in that held breath something becomes audible that the noise usually drowns: the texture of one’s own attention.

We have built a civilisation that treats silence as a vacuum to be filled. Every interval is monetised, every pause backfilled with notification, soundtrack, podcast, chatter. The result is not more information but a thinner kind of thought — thinking that never gets the room it needs to deepen into understanding.