Sriya Sridhar

My countervailing advice to people trying to understand something is: go slow. Read slowly, think slowly, really spend time pondering the thing. Start by thinking about the question yourself before reading a bunch of stuff about it. A week or a month of continuous pondering about a question will get you surprisingly far.

“When Sontag read Gide’s journals, she identified so deeply with his thinking, she wrote, ‘I am not only reading this book, but creating it myself.’” Reading can offer an experience of communion: a synthesis can occur when the thinking self, or internal monologue, merges with the author’s.

“Don’t rush, but don’t wait.

Act with urgency, but release yourself from the need to achieve it on a particular timeline. When you think longer term than most, you can think bigger than most.

If it takes years, start now.”

thinking is an active pursuit — one that often happens when you are spending long stretches of time staring into space, then writing a bit, and then staring into space a bit more. It’s here that the connections are made and the insights are formed. And it is a process that stubbornly resists automation.