I frequently revisit the ‘Why Read’ question in these pages—and find myself drawn to writings that crop up periodically on this subject. I am not sure I will ever find a complete answer—and I don’t need to: the experience of deep reading and discussing great literature continues to open up realms both in my mind and in my understanding of others.
I was at a talk recently on reading Chaucer—Paul Strohm’s enthusiasm for his subject infused the presentation. He also visited the ‘Why read’ question. He suggested reading great literature enlarges our sympathies and allows us to gain access to a more nuanced and inclusive view of the world.
Reading significant literature does for me something similar to meeting and coming to know people who see the world in a different light. At first I may feel challenged and frustrated-but given some time and patience, being jarred by a different view, a different set of values, a difficult personality rubs me towards a greater clarity and—I hope—feeds my capacity for empathy. The excerpt below from Joshua Rothman’s The History of “Loving” to Read recently in the NewYorker focuses on the emotive response to literature—how readers fall in love with a work and the place it creates inside them. Here is an excerpt (the whole article can be found here: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/history-loving-read?mbid=social_facebook)
If anything, the fervor of the Janeites puts into relief a fact almost too obvious to notice: the world of books is a romantic world. Romance structures literary life, and to be a reader is, often, to follow its choreography, from susceptibility and discovery (“I just saw it there in the bookstore!”) to infatuation, intimacy, identification, and obsession. We connect with books in an intellectual way, but the most valuable relationships we have with them are emotional; to say that you merely admire or respect a book is, on some level, to insult it. Feelings are so fundamental to literary life that it can be hard to imagine a way of relating to literature that doesn’t involve loving it. Without all those emotions, what would reading be?
“Stoner” John Williams,
288 pages. Vintage
A novel that was recommended very highly by Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as a must read last year. This novel first published in the 1970s, was re-published last year. The style is classical, beautiful, and the story of the life of an “ordinary” Professor of Literature – and what literature and reading means – is extraordinarily powerful, engaging and moving. It is a must read for those that have not yet read it.
Excerpt:
“He spent much of the summer rereading the classical and Medieval Latin poets, and especially their poems upon death. He wondered again at the easy, graceful manner in which the Roman lyricists accepted the fact of death, as if the nothingness they faced were a tribute to the richness of the years they had enjoyed; and he marvelled at the bitterness, the terror the barely concealed hatred he found in some of the later Christian poets of the Latin tradition when they looked to that death which promised, however vaguely, a rich and ecstatic eternity of life, as if that death and promise were a mockery that soured the days of their living.”
Denise.