I've just seen in an online lecture that post-great-schism there was a change in how reading happened and I'd like to know if there are some ways to "recover" the older one or if anyone here has any experience with this.
Supposedly, ancient practice of reading was more akin to a recitation - embodied, aloud, often communal, letting the text transform you as a sperson and engaging all your emotional faculties during the process. Post-schism there was an increasing tendency in the West to rely on Aristotelian approach of determining "substances" aka definitions and to relate them... reading became an act of absorbing propositions and re-arranging them in your head in ways that make sense and build models.

For a long time I did not "get" poetry, until I slowed down to like 20% of my reading speed and let each individual word trigger images and associations in me. Is this what is meant by embodied reading as opposed to absorbing propositions? Any advice? To this day when I read the Old Testament I "get" maybe 40% of it and I think it might be the Aristotelian approach blocking me.

>>24576225 (OP)
It sounds like the first key is finding other people to read with. I’m not educated on any of what you’re talking about, but the missing ingredient in that older style of reading seems to be the communal aspect. Maybe find some fellow-autists to shout poetry with and make sure the goal of your project is clear and accepted by them, then make yourself the first reader and slowly, vividly work through the text imagining yourself as a sort of dyonisian bard entertaining village revelers

>>24576225 (OP)
Here's Schopenhauer's take.

>>24576335
Totally agreed. To follow exactly Aquinas' reasoning I'd have to dedicate to him so much of my mental arena that he might as well pay rent, all while I suspect that most of his lingo is about semantics and not about any real differences. Has anyone debunked Aquinas so I don't have to go through all that?