Paranoid Reading

Bookmarked Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison by Austin Kleon (Austin Kleon)

You can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death.

“Anyone who’s spent time on the internet in the past few years will recognise how it feels to be caught up in paranoid reading,” [Olivia] Laing writes. The paranoid reader is all about “gathering information,” addicted to the idea that the “next click, the next link” that will bring clarity. But clarity never comes, because you can never, ever know enough to avoid danger and disaster.

— Austin Kleon

“A useful analogy for what [Eve Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison.”

— Olivia Laing