The Owl Has Flown

Sven Birkerts' "The Owl Has Flown," discusses some in depth analysis on reading and thinking. He talks about how people comprehend writing/reading entirely different now, than they did hundreds of years ago. For example, he says, "The result is that we know countless more "bits" of information, both important and trivial, than our ancestors. We known know them without a stable sense of context, for where the field is that vast all schemes must be seen as provisional." (p.73). In other words, we read but we do not truly look in to the content; we do not want to expand on the knowledge. I agree with this, I believe that society now is very interested in a getting a brief background on lots of information, for example, the a la carte enclyopedia style of Wikipedia. Later in the essay I think that Birkets makes an interesting point about wisdom. He says, "Wisdom is seeing through facts, a penetration to the underlying laws and patterns. It relates the immediate to something larger..." (p.75). I believe he is trying to explain how wisdom is about engaging the real. One must believe that things are real in order to acquire "wisdom." Therefore, I think that Birkets makes some very interesting observations on reading, knowledge, and wisdom. This is the kind of essay that makes you re-evaluate how you think about life in general.