Life & Wisdom Quote by Raymond Chandler

Chandler lands the metaphor like a detective’s clue: if reading has become “gulping,” then something has shifted not just in taste but in physiology. The line isn’t nostalgia for leather-bound quiet; it’s a diagnosis of speed as a cultural solvent. “Flood” does the heavy lifting, suggesting abundance as a kind of natural disaster, a force that doesn’t invite choice so much as it overwhelms it. Print, the supposed engine of enlightenment, becomes an agent of appetite and panic.

The intent is sharper than a general complaint about distractions. Chandler is pointing at how mass production changes the reader’s posture toward language. When books, magazines, and papers arrive in relentless volume, reading stops being an encounter and becomes consumption management. “Process” is the tell: he’s describing a habit system, not an individual failure of attention. Gulping is what you do when you’re rushed, competing, trying to keep up, when the goal is throughput rather than pleasure or understanding. Savoring implies rereading, lingering, letting style and implication accumulate; gulping implies headlines, plot extraction, social signaling.

Context matters: Chandler wrote in the era of exploding pulp markets and industrialized entertainment, when literacy was increasingly routed through commerce. Coming from a stylist who built elegance out of hard-boiled minimalism, the warning carries an extra sting. He’s not anti-pop; he’s anti-glut. The subtext is that when quantity sets the tempo, even good prose gets treated like fuel.