slow reading

I've been reading Homer's "The Iliad". I've tried to do this before, and have always got stuck, mired down in too many names, and convoluted narrative. This time I'm reading it slowly. I've decided that I'm only allowed one chapter a day. It's good. It makes me take time with it, I listen to myself as I tell the story in my head. And it makes it come alive, I'm struck by the pacing, the repetitions, the skill of the narrator. When Agamemnon says to Odysseus go and tell Achilles "etc etc so on and so forth", Odysseus repeats it word for word, and when Achilles sends a message back it's also repeated in entire.

It's reminded me of "slow reading". A way of approaching philosophical reading developed and put up on the web by Lancelot R Fletcher. He writes:

. . . make the following test: Read a sentence of eight or ten words to a group of students -- to anybody -- and ask them to reproduce the sentence word for word. My experience has been that almost everybody responds by telling what they thought the sentence meant -- in different words, not the same -- and in the process, anything incongruous, perplexing or ambiguous -- anything, in short, which might be an opening for learning to occur -- tends to be disregarded. Obviously this is not a lesson that any of us can claim to have learned sufficiently. We are so preoccupied with deciding what the sentences we read and hear MEAN, and especially with deciding whether WE agree or disagree, whether WE approve or disapprove, that we generally do not pause to take note of what the sentences SAY.

And I think this is why I'm having more success with the Iliad through chapter by chapter reading, I'm actually listening to what is happening, and pausing to make sure I've read (or heard) correctly.