Pagedrift

pagedrift (PAYJ-drift), noun. The silent departure of the mind from a page that the eyes carry on reading without it, discovered several paragraphs later with no memory whatsoever of the journey. You are sitting in a comfortable chair with a book you are genuinely enjoying. The lamp is warm, the room is quiet, and you are turning pages at a steady rate. Then, somewhere around the middle of chapter four, you realise that you have no idea what has happened since chapter three.

The word joins page with drift, in the sense used of a small boat whose rope has quietly slipped off its post. Nothing dramatic happens. Nobody shouts, and there is no sudden jolt. The distance simply grows, a little at a time, until the shore is a long way off. Pagedrift is not boredom. A drifting reader is very often enjoying the book enormously, which is exactly what makes the moment of return so undignified.

The strangest part is that the eyes keep up appearances. They go on moving along the lines, from left to right, word after word, doing a perfectly convincing impression of reading. The pages keep turning. The bookmark keeps moving forward. No alarm sounds. There is only the moment of surfacing, the slow climb back up the page, and the careful hunt for the last sentence you could honestly swear to in court. Sometimes it is further back than you would like to admit.

Usage: “She read four pages about the siege in a state of total pagedrift, went back to the top, and discovered that the siege had not started yet, and neither had she.” Related conditions include shelfdrift, which strikes in bookshops and ends with you holding a cookbook you did not mean to pick up, and the dreaded audiodrift, in which an entire chapter of an audiobook passes during a single walk to the shops.

Behind the joke is an experience nearly every reader knows. Minds wander, even during things we enjoy, and reading is especially good at hiding it, because the eyes can keep moving along the lines on something close to autopilot. A tired evening, a comfortable chair or a single sentence that reminds you of something else is often all it takes. It happens to careful readers and book lovers just as much as to anyone, and it is no reflection on the book.

So if you catch yourself in the middle of a pagedrift, there is no need to feel guilty. Go back to the last line you remember, read it again slowly, and carry on from there. If it keeps happening, it may simply be a sign to put the book down, stretch, or pick it up again tomorrow with fresh eyes. The story will wait patiently exactly where you left it, which is more than can be said for your attention.