I EDIT THREE TYPES of work: my writing, other people’s writing, and the two-headed monster that is my translation work — a mix of my writing and somebody else’s. When I teach creative writing I also close read the so-called classics with my students. These four activities amount to a lot of extremely slow reading, and I’ve come to regard that slowness as the only thing I love about literature. When you speed it up, it becomes news, it becomes content, it becomes entertainment. When it’s slow, and it’s slow for hours, for days, it helps you glance beyond the hollow network of meanings that we cater to in order to be a functional society.