In a cover interview in
the February issue of Keyboard magazine, the brilliant jazz pianist Keith Jarrett drops an arresting line in one of his
answers. Never one to mince words, he laments “this stupid world we live in” in
the context of people’s ability and willingness to engage in sustained
concentration. He is talking, in part, about the audience for great music, but
more, too. He explains:
“ … You can feel the
attention span of the world dwindling; you can feel people not paying attention
to things that are difficult. When I read a book, I try to sacrifice myself to
the book, even if it doesn’t occur to me until 400 pages into it what the voice
of the writer is like. Then finally I get it. If I didn’t go that far, I would
have never figured it out.”
From this much-traveled
man a great line to ponder: “You can feel the attention span of the world
dwindling …” There are many reasons, of course, for this short-focus problem,
beginning, in my view, with technology and visual media, but also the failure
of many parents to regularly read to their small children and engage in other
activities that develop young attention spans, and to restrict television
viewing.
One of the means by which the adult can purposefully try to counteract
the “stupid world” of which Jarrett speaks is a quiet room. So simple and, amid
our technological blizzard, so ironic. Doesn’t have to be big. Just a quiet
room, and no interruptions. In this way, you read a great short story word for
word, listen to a great symphony or concerto end to end, enter entirely into every note of a
jazz improvisation, get thoroughly immersed in a novel. (Pascal: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit
quietly in a room alone.”)
Lately, for me, I’ve tried
to slow the world down and lengthen focus by getting on a biography
kick—currently, the wartime story of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt (by Doris
Kearns Goodwin); upcoming, Michael Slater’s life of Dickens, Janet Browne’s second
volume on Darwin, and John Lewis Gaddis’ new biography of George Kennan. It is
a genre that, when well done, takes you deeply into another time and life and
helps you understand the arc of a notable human journey.
Later on at dinner,
though, I’ll have the iPod on for some music, and of this Mr. Jarrett would probably
heartily disapprove. “The listening part—today it seems like it’s bits and
pieces, and ‘What’s your favorite track?’ ” he says in the interview. “People
walk around with a thousand tracks on their little machines. But it is a process,
and the awareness of the process is being lost.”
-- Ron Kovach, senior
editor, The Writer