There is a kind of reading that needs the world to step back.
Not the casual reading of news headlines between meetings, nor the half-attentive scroll through feeds. I mean the slower reading — the one that requires the page to remain still long enough for the words to settle.
When the room is quiet, the sentence arrives as a complete thing. When the room is loud, the sentence is broken into syllables and each syllable becomes noise.
I do not think we read poorly because we have lost the skill. I think we read poorly because we have lost the silence that lets the skill operate. The skill is still there — in the way we sometimes pause at a phrase and feel the weight of it. That pause is the remnant of an older habit, a habit that required rooms without buzzing.
A page of well-written prose is, in a sense, a room without buzzing. The author has done the work of clearing the air. The reader’s job is to keep it clear.