I enjoy reading articles. A quick look at my browsing history reveals that today alone I have looked at a friend’s listicle “5 electronic producers to listen to this fall,” a New Yorker article “Humans of New York and the Cavalier Consumption of Others,” and a Eugene Weekly piece “Teacher and Michael Copperman” about a local writer’s book release for his memoir about teaching in the Mississippi Delta. And that’s just on my laptop.

For someone who tries so hard to spend time efficiently, I am a sucker for jumping from link to link, hour after hour. The above articles are not items I actively searched for. They simply appeared on my Facebook feed during browsing sessions and I clicked on them.

My link-following is serpentine. Once I innocently opened Facebook and a page I follow had shared the “Psychology Today” article “What’s the Most Powerful Way to Raise Your Self-Esteem?” I found the article’s answer to the question posed in the title to be more interesting than similar articles’ claims: apparently eradicating avoidance behaviors is key. But this led to reading “But It Worked For Me: The Value of Self-Experimentation” from the “People Also Shared” list. A slightly less satisfying read, this led me to Google “self-experimentation” and the Wikipedia entry’s list of “Self-Experimentation in Fiction” had me reading up on “The Invisible Man” and The Lizard from the Spider-Man comics.

When I put it on paper, going from self-acceptance to the Lizard sounds like a singularly inane track. But this kind of free-association following is one of my greatest online pleasures. I connect unlikely dots into a unique shape that becomes a self-enclosed loop. It is knowledge for knowledge’s sake, learning for the heady pleasure of learning.

On this same occasion, my Facebook page remained open and I saw someone had tagged a friend in a shared article, “Toronto: Multiple Moviegoers Pass Out During Cannibal Movie ‘Raw’ Screening.” Apparently a new French-language horror film about a vegetarian’s metamorphosis to cannibal screened at the Toronto Film Festival and drew paramedics as audience members fainted from the gory spectacle. As I started hunting for reviews and trailers, I came across a New Yorker review of another movie, “Don’t Breathe,” in my still-open feed. The movie centers on three young people breaking into a blind man’s house to rob him, only to find him a formidable specimen with deadly reflexes. In the review, I found mention of a horror movie from last year called “Green Room,” and looked up the Wikipedia article. Apparently the 2015 film about a punk band playing a gig in backwoods Oregon that turns out to be a neo-Nazi skinhead bar, where they are later held hostage after discovering a murder victim.

Now, this connecting-the-dots was more focused, centering on recent psychological horror movies, and I derived some more clearly defined ideas from it. First of all, I used to be extremely into the psychological horror genre. I preferred it to supernatural horror because, as the “Don’t Breathe” reviewer points out, it leaves only “human cruelty” to carry the film. But as I read the reviews, I realized I had lost my familiarity with the genre. They included conversations about how a horror film can be a “crossover” into emotionally engaging, psychologically complex territory, as in the case of “Raw.” The portrayals of sexual and racialized violence in “Don’t Breathe” and “Green Room,” respectively, also led to questions about portrayals of human cruelty with the core problem that they are all too ubiquitous in life. I realized I no longer had the ability to conjure up examples from other films to dialogue with the examples from these films, contrast and compare.

In this case, the link-following helped me delve a little bit into a niche, one I used to occupy. When I explore other people’s areas of intense specialization, I begin to get a sense of how wide, complex, and saturated the world is, the communities and subcommunities and offshoots that populate it. I enjoy this because it seems there is room enough and material enough for everyone to “follow their bliss,” as one of my professors puts it.

In the midst of this, I also turned to the Facebook page for poetry website Drunk in a Midnight Choir to give me inspiration for the one-credit class on poetry I’ll be teaching soon. While searching for an article I read in May and of which I had no hope of remembering the title or author, I clicked on Jeremy Radin’s “26 Things Emotionally Strong People Do.” This poem hilariously mocks positivity psychobabble. Consider #9: “Emotionally strong people avoid emotionally weak situations and patterns, such as re-establishing contact with an ex-partner who is doing good or consistently forgetting their bag of activated almonds,” or #14: “The tea with the silver needles in it.” Of course, I was busy ransacking Drunk in a Midnight Choir for other gems, and found them in forms from the editorial “Why It Matters that Harley Quinn and Joker’s Relationship is Abusive” to the interview “Conversation with Ocean Vuong” (a luminous small-press poet).

So there is the narrative of how I spent an hour of my life. Or, some might say, wasted it.

My link-following can be a feedback loop, exclusively exposing me to fairly liberal content with a strong literary bent instead of new content, new voices. It can be a monumental time-suck. Flitting from subject to subject can preclude a deeper study of any single topic.

At the same time, I believe in the creative potential of two disparate, nascent ideas reverberating off of each other. I remember reading a book in which poet Muriel Rukeyser tells about how an image of a whale and sections of an Emily Post etiquette book melded together in create one of her poems.

I also believe in the power of gleaning a few scraps of new info or ideas a day -- often times the aspects of articles that most clearly stick in my memory have little to do with the article’s main point. For example, I discovered my current favorite author, Maggie Nelson, when I happened to read a New Yorker article about her recent memoir “The Argonauts.” The aleatory branching of information brings us an olive branch (or twig), throws us the occasional bone.

Another New Yorker article I recently read, “The Encyclopedia Reader” by Daniel A. Gross, tells the story of Robin Woods, a man who read the entire Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia during a lengthy prison sentence and began a friendship with the book’s editor via letters. The article concludes with a quote from the T.H. White novel “The Once and Future King.” In homage to Gross’s article, I conclude this article with the same quote:

“The best thing for being said is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love. . . . There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”