Why read? It’s a question I’m often faced with as an English student, and while I have some answers, the ones I favor are the ones that will only sound compelling to the devout reader. (For example, reading is a way to beauty, and beauty is valuable in itself.) To be honest, I formed the habit of reading long before I considered to ask why I did. It delighted me, and that was enough. Yet, there are a number of easier delights to pursue. After all, reading makes certain demands on one’s attention, among other things. So why did I, and why do others, persist in pursuing reading’s more difficult pleasures? One reason, among many, is that as a schoolchild I had friends with other interests than mine, and while they spent their lunch breaks playing sports, I spent mine reading books.
During such lunch periods, and other like times, books provided me with enjoyable diversions, along with a sense of personal presence. There is a recollection from Harold Bloom’s Possessed by Memory to which my bosom “returns an echo”: “When I was very young, I read poems incessantly because I was lonely and somehow must have believed they could become people for me.” In an earlier book, How to Read and Why, Bloom writes,
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness.
Not infrequently, Bloom invokes the concluding advice of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy: “Be not solitary, be not idle.” Samuel Johnson fine-tuned the advice to “If you are idle, be not solitary; if you are solitary be not idle.” How might this advice apply to the life of the reader? Reading not only saves solitude from being idle, but alleviates solitude of its loneliness. Many readers are prone to melancholy, and many of them are saved by literature’s nightingale-song from becoming, in John Keats’ immortal words, more than “half in love with easeful Death.”
Few things are so refreshing for one’s spiritual welfare as turning out of the self and towards another. Books, one must readily acknowledge, are not people, yet this sense of encountering personal presences in literature is not, I think, illusory. They are, after all (if one eschews Chat GPT’s computer-generated claptrap), written by people who undergo, as T.S. Eliot puts it, “the pains of turning blood into ink.” Books are, fundamentally, real connections with real people. In them, we encounter another. Critics like Owen Barfield or Hans-Georg Gadamer theorize something about this encounter when they speak of “a felt change in consciousness” or a “fusion of horizons.” That is to say, in reading, we encounter a vision of the world that is other than our own, and in that encounter, our own vision of the world is affected. In subtle, perhaps imperceptible ways, our whole manner of being in the world is changed.
Such an encounter, of course, is also an exercise in empathy. In reading, to evoke Harper Lee’s classic novel To Kill a Mockingbird, we climb into another’s skin and walk around in it. If one has a heart of flesh and not of stone (or, like Javert in Les Miserables, a heart of wood), how could one carry out such a practice and remain unchanged? And what is this encounter and the change it produces other than a gift? Upon returning to a state of self-possession after a period of intense reading, I often feel a profound sense of gratitude. I could cry out, as Bloom does in Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles, “How much we are offered in these generous lines. And how little we need to give in return.” Rendering nothing to a book but an open heart and some time, I have my humanity enriched and rendered more humane.
Few people have considered the issue as probingly or as eloquently as C.S. Lewis in An Experiment in Criticism:
The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it’….
Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors…. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough….
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality…. [I]n reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
Lewis detects two impulses in us: one exalts the self and the other humbles it. Lewis obviously has the teachings of Jesus, the Lord of Lords who emptied himself to be a slave of slaves, in mind: Matthew 23:12: “[W]hosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted” (KJV).
Sympathetic reading is an act of self-renunciation. For a spell, the readers of Dante’s Divine Comedy, or Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, or John Milton’s Paradise Lost, know what it is to enter a Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant imagination. How can one not love a scholasticism that takes one on a pilgrimage from Hell, through Purgatory, to Heaven, and that shows along the way how the divine Love flows through all three? How can one resist the force of Orthodox teachings when they are delivered through the dying breaths of Father Zosima or enacted in the life of Alyosha? How can one question the nature of the Atonement when God the Father exposits it to God the Son in delectable lines of iambic pentameter? How, when the Beautiful is as venerable a name for God as the True and the Good?
One will usually be more given to listen attentively as parts unfold into a whole, when the parts are delivered in the form of such fanciful morsels, than when they are delivered in the form of treatise by an Augustine of Hippo or a Thomas Aquinas, a Symeon the New Theologian or a Gregory Palamas, a John Calvin or a Jacobus Arminius. In the latter kind of reading, people are typically on the defensive, all-too-ready to mark as clearly as possible the matters that divide them. And such is the Narcissism of Small Differences that the people engaged in marking out such differences will emphasize and inflate them until the common ground is rendered hard to see. To echo a verse of Wallace Stevens’, imaginative reading renders the “demarcations” between ourselves as “ghostlier” and the “sounds” of our agreement “keener.”
Nor do the fictional works need to be as encyclopedic as the ones given to have their empathetic function. Even shorter, seemingly simpler, works shape our sensibilities. The reader of Alice in Wonderland will feel the impress of Lewis Carrol’s Anglican imagination, and the reader of The Hobbit will feel the impress of Tolkien’s Catholic one.
At its root, the desire for otherness that literature feeds is theological. The source of creation is the triune God, whose creation is truly gratuitous, because he needs nothing that does not already exist within himself, as loving Father, beloved Son, and Holy Spirit, who is their bond of love. As Sergius Bulgakov reasons in The Lamb of God, all the modes of personal existence—“I, thou, he, we, and you”—exist in God’s triune selfhood. Yet creaturely personality “has all these modes except I outside itself, in other personalities, and is thus limited and conditioned by them in its being.” Thus, we are only ourselves when we are in communion with others, for only by being in communion with others may we attain the likeness of the Trinitarian God who created us in his image.
Reading is a part of this communion. It ought not be prioritized over the love we bear to our fellow human beings whom we connect with, flesh to flesh, in everyday life. Yet reading allows us to connect with others across larger stretches of space and time. It brings us into contact with those people whose flesh had returned to dust long before we were conceived, and it brings us into contact with people from countries we shall never be able to visit or meet visitors from. And in reading, we lower those more defensive parts of our mind, those parts more readily skeptical of what is other than ourselves, so in reading, we are more ready to encounter angels unaware. The reader, like D.H. Lawrence’s “Man Who Has Come Through,” is the person who will say to the “strange angels” that “knock at the door in the night:” “Admit them, admit them.”
Bret van den Brink is a poet and literary scholar who will soon begin pursuing his M.A. at the University of Toronto. Recently, his long narrative poem “The Patient Bride: A Vision in a Dream” was published in Mars’ Hill 28.4, and his sonnet series “Measure for Measure: Five Readings” was published in Westmarch 4.3.