Attention Deficit

Apparently, I’ve fallen victim to the growing epidemic of attention deficit disorder, or at least an abbreviated attention span. I discovered this over the past week as I’ve been trying to get through Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life. It’s quite an interesting biography. And because I visited Mount Vernon a couple of years ago, I have a number of points of personal reference. But it’s also extremely detailed and lengthy, 822 pages of text that takes me three to four minutes a page to read. That works out to almost 50 hours of reading, or at an average of two hours a day, 25 days or almost four weeks, and I can only check it out from the library for three weeks. I use the “two hours a day” average because as an undergraduate I took a British Novel class and the professor said that we should be able to read any novel in two weeks reading two hours a day. And in that class we read Pamela, Tristram Shandy, Tale of Two Cities, and Ulysses, as well as a few shorter works. During one vacation week in the early 1980s, I read One Hundred Years of Solitude (464 pages) in three days. But I struggle to get through Chernow’s book, distracted by the contemplation of how long it’s taken me to do so. And it’s not that the book is not engaging. It is. It’s just that I’m not able to maintain my engagement through such a dense work. And I’m not sure what to make of it. Is it just a temporary condition related to this book? Or has my reading of most things online shortened my attention span? Or is it my growing old? (Sad that that last question is one that pops up more and more lately in regards to any and every thing.)