fovea
The Inner Citadel
Summary
An original summary of the book by Pierre Hadot, written from scratch for Fovea.
Summaries come with Fovea Pro. Importing and reading your own books is free forever.
Be clear about this
Fovea wrote this summary of The Inner Citadel independently and from scratch, in our own words. We do not reproduce, abridge or excerpt The Inner Citadel. A summary carries the ideas and the argument, not the sentences that expressed them, and it runs at roughly a sixth of the length of the book behind it.
It is not written by, affiliated with, or endorsed by Pierre Hadot or the publisher. The title and the author are named here for identification only, and the cover art is generated for Fovea rather than taken from the book’s real jacket.
If you want the actual book, buy it, then import it into Fovea and read it here for nothing. That will never be behind a subscription.
How long it takes
A Fovea summary runs about 6,000 words. Read with the pacing the app actually uses, the median one in the catalog takes:
These are medians across the catalog, not this title’s exact figure, and they are measured rather than calculated: the gap between words is not constant, so words divided by speed gives a number the reader never produces. The last row is there for honesty, not as a recommendation. Comprehension gives out somewhere around 350 to 500 words a minute, and where exactly is a property of the text, not of the app.
Fovea puts one word on screen and pins its optimal recognition point, the letter at which a word is recognised fastest, to the same spot every time. What holds that point still is the layout: every word is positioned around that letter rather than centred. The colour only shows you where the point is. We have no evidence that colouring it helps you read.
Moving your eyes is not where reading time goes. A jump takes 20 to 40 milliseconds against the 200 to 250 of the fixation after it, so it is about a tenth of the total. Fovea takes back that tenth and the work of finding the next line. It does not make you read several times faster, and anyone promising that is selling you something.
Roughly one eye movement in seven goes backwards, and stopping readers from looking back measurably costs comprehension. So going back is not buried in a menu. Let go and the stream stops, tap the left edge to step back, swipe to scrub word by word or sentence by sentence, and switch to the paginated view to sit with a passage the ordinary way.
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