NYT Magazine - March 22 2020

Illustration by Radio 17

Tip By Malia Wollan

it wrong, and you are punished. Trump?
Here? It was like discovering a slug in
my oatmeal.
The gym I now belong to has codi-
fied this clarity. It describes itself as a
‘‘Judgement Free Zone,’’ and there are
not only signs everywhere dissuading
boorishness but also an actual ‘‘Lunk
Alarm’’ that goes off like an air-raid
siren if the level of testosterone rises
too high. I’ve heard it only once, and the
poor Samson who set it off (by dropping
his weights with a roar) seemed close
to tears when he realized why all eyes
were on him. (I have no idea who sets
it off, probably God.)
Every gym has its own elaborate tax-
onomy, and there was a time when this
fascinated and enlivened me. The queens
and the drones, the whippets and the pea-
cocks. Nothing like decline to erode one’s
belief in distinctions. It’s no wonder I’ve
ended up in a gym that’s mostly a lumpen
mass of humanity, a gym that does not
simply tolerate debacle and decrepitude
but actively celebrates it. We are encour-
aged to enjoy a free piece of candy as we
leave, and once a month a large table is
piled high with bagels and pizza.
For a brief time, though, a god dwelt
among us. Tall, provocatively bald (you
suspected a mane, I mean), chiseled as a
cliff , he performed only two exercises. The
fi rst involved a pull-up bar and is beyond
my powers of description. He alternated
this with standing leaps onto an adjust-
able platform. That is to say, one minute
he stood with an air of intense concen-
tration, and then, with just a ripple in his
skin like a breeze passing over still water,
he materialized some fi ve feet higher
in the air. Without a wobble. I’ve never
seen anything like it, and judging from
the way he disrupted others, no one else
had, either. How I loved watching him; he
made a whole diff erent relation to exercise
— and, somehow, to life — seem possible.
And how glad I was when he was gone, for
the same reason. Predictability, anonymi-
ty, oblivion — again, these are the elements
of a good gym. No epiphanies, please.
Which brings me face to face, as it
were, with my fi nal point: mirrors. These
are, of course, ubiquitous in gyms, and
for years I used them as everyone does,
pretending to check out my form while
checking out other unattainable things.
Only lately have I realized the true focus
and genius of this décor choice — as well

as how much money it has saved me. ‘‘If

a man stands before a mirror,’’ the nov-

elist Flann O’Brien writes, ‘‘and sees in it

his refl ections, what he sees is not a true

reproduction of himself but a picture of

himself when he was a younger man.’’

This is, in my experience, correct. (And

I suspect the specifi city of the gender

is damningly accurate.) But of late, the

self that has been ghosting the glass in

front of me is not a man with pecs and

purpose, nor even a man with, say, a bit

of hair and decent knees.

He’s not a man at all, in fact, but a little

boy of 10, back in 1976 when my daily

exercise regimen began. I am certain of

the date because ‘‘Rocky’’ came out that

year, and one morning I downed (like

Rocky) and later upped (unlike Rocky) a

tall glass full of raw eggs as part of my

‘‘training.’’ I have forgotten the house we

lived in at the time, can’t recall a meal or

a holiday or even one word we said. Yet

I remember every scent and sight of the

predawn runs I began taking around the

neighborhood, and the exact heft of my

fi rst plastic- coated dumbbells. A thera-

pist would make much of this, no doubt,

but obviously I don’t need a therapist. I

have a gym.

How to Read

Faster

‘‘There are no shortcuts,’’ says Elizabeth

Schotter, an assistant professor of psy-

chology at the University of South Flor-

ida, where she runs the Eye Movements

and Cognition Lab. College- educated

adults usually read between 200 and

400 words per minute (a comfortable

listening rate is around 150 words per

minute). The speediest speed readers

claim as many as 30,000 words per

minute, at which point research would

suggest a signifi cant loss of comprehen-

sion. It might be fi ne to skim through

a user manual for an offi ce printer, but

don’t skim ‘‘Anna Karenina’’ and expect

to understand it. ‘‘In this modern age,

we always want to do everything fast-

er,’’ says Schotter, whose lab uses high-

speed video to analyze readers’ eyes as

they dart across text. America’s speed-

reading obsession confounds Schotter;

on average, people read twice as fast as

they can comfortably listen. Reading is

visually and cognitively complicated; it’s

OK to reread a line because it’s confusing

or, better yet, to linger on a phrase so

beautiful that it makes you want to close

your eyes.

You tend to read faster by reading

more. One of the biggest infl uences on

your pace is what psycho linguists call the

word- frequency eff ect; the more times

you’ve encountered a word, the faster

you’ll recognize it. Your eyes will fi xate

longer on less- familiar words, making

you more likely to stall on ‘‘abode,’’

for example, than the more common

‘‘house.’’ Skilled readers start to predict

words and meaning even in their blurry

peripheral vision, which allows them to

skip more words, especially short ones.

Readers skip the word ‘‘the,’’ for exam-

ple, around 50 percent of the time. ‘‘If

you spend all your time reading ‘Harry

Potter,’ you’re going to get really good

at reading ‘Harry Potter,’ ’’ says Schotter,

who suggests taking in a wide variety of

texts to expand your vocabulary.

Sometimes you’ll fi nd yourself need-

ing to reread a word, a sentence or even

a paragraph to understand its meaning.

Researchers call these regressions, and

faster readers generally make fewer

of them than slower readers do. Some

writing is harder to decode and predict

and is more likely to trigger regressions.

Among the hardest are what psycho-

linguists call garden- path sentences,

like ‘‘The cotton clothes are made up of

grows in Mississippi.’’ If speed is your

aim, the clearer the prose, the faster

you’ll read. ‘‘Part of the burden,’’ Schot-

ter says, ‘‘is on the writer.’’

A good gym, like

a good bar, fuses

two things:

oblivion and

anonymity.

Christian Wiman

is the author, editor or

translator of 12 books

of poetry and prose,

including ‘‘Survival Is

a Style,’’ a poetry

collection published last

month by Farrar,

Straus & Giroux.