Finally getting to return to the wonderful home of the Salons and the dynamic Paris community! These two works we have been considering studying for many months– but life kept interrupting– as it does. I hope you are able to join for these incredible works…
“But there is a cure in the house,
and not outside it, no,
not from others but from them,
their bloody strife. We sing to you,
dark gods beneath the earth.”
Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night; who turn over in their sleep, who utter their confused cries, who put out their phantom fingers and clutch at me as I try to escape—shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.
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?
