The Importance of Reading

When we read we get to step into the shoes of another human being. In that journey of a mile — or perhaps hundreds of miles if you consider the great epics — comes greater understanding, empathy, and the humility that comes from the realization that you don’t know everything (and you shouldn’t have to; besides no one likes a no-it-all). In short, we read to understand ourselves and our fellow man in the hope that we can become better human beings. But don’t take my word for it, here are some of the world’s greatest thinkers and writers on the importance of reading:

Socrates: Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writing so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.

Aldous Huxley: Every man who knows who to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.

T.S. Eliot: Someone once said, “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

Henry David Thoreau: A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint… What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

William Ellery Channing: It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds… In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their soul into ours. God be thanked for books.

William Faulkner: [Man] is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

Emily Dickinson:
He ate and drank the precious words,
His spirit grew robust;
He knew no more that he was poor,
Nor that his frame was dust.
He danced along the dingy days,
And this bequest of wings
Was but a book. What liberty
A loosened spirit brings!

Read related posts:
The Poem I Turn To
Great Literature Speaks
William Faulkner on the Writer’s Duty
What is Your Legacy?
The Power of Literature
Universal Human Values
The Poem I Turn To
Why Read Dickens?
The Benefits of Reading
50 Books That Will Change Your Life
The Books that Shaped America
Why Reading is Critical to the Writer
Is Reading Essential for Success?
The Books that Most People Begin Reading but Don’t Finish

For further reading: The Delights of Reading by Otto Bettmann

How Stories Last

In a recent seminar, sponsored by The Long Now Foundation that fosters long-term thinking, British author Neil Gaiman spoke eloquently and passionately about the importance of stories and how they endure, inspire, and sustain us. Gaiman explained: “Stories teach us how the world is put together and the rules of living in the world, and they come in an attractive enough package that we take pleasure from them and want to help them propagate.”

One of the most profound lessons about the importance of stories came from his 97-year-old cousin, Helen Fagin, a Holocaust survivor. During the Nazi occupation, Fagin taught math, language, grammar, to young girls who lived in a Polish ghetto. Gaiman recounts: “A few years ago, she started telling me this story of how, in the ghetto, they were not allowed books. If you had a book the Nazis could put a gun to your head and pull the trigger — books were forbidden. And she used to teach under the pretense of having a sewing class, a class of about twenty little girls, and they would come in for about an hour a day, and she would teach them math, she’d teach them Polish, she’d teach them grammar. One day, somebody slipped her a Polish translation of Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind. [Fagin] blacked out her window so she could stay up an extra hour [so she could] read a chapter of Gone with the Wind. And when the girls came in the next day, instead of teaching them, she told them what happened in the book. And each night, she’d stay up. And each day, she’d tell them the story.

Gaiman asked Fagin why she would risk death for a story. Fagin answered: “Because for an hour every day, those girls weren’t in the ghetto – they were in the American South; they were having adventures — they got away.” Gaiman adds: “I think four out of those twenty girls survived the war. And [Fagin] told me how, when she was an old woman, she found one of them, who was also an old woman. And they got together and called each other by names from Gone with the Wind.”

Great stories then, as this anecdote proves so powerfully, magically transport us to another world. Gaiman observes: “The magic of escapist fiction is that it can offer you escape from an otherwise intolerable situation, and it can furnish you with armor, knowledge, weapons, and other tools you can take back into your life to make it better.” And sometimes, great stories, like faith, are the only things that can provide a glimmer of hope in the darkest corners of the world.

Read related posts:
The Meaning of the Great Gatsby Ending
Why Read Dickens?
The Power of Literature
The Benefits of Reading
50 Books That Will Change Your Life
The Books that Shaped America
Why Study Literature?

For further reading: http://blog.longnow.org
http://blog.longnow.org/02015/06/15/neil-gaiman-seminar-media/

Reading Literature: Building a Castle of Words

Imagination is certainly essential to science, applied or pure. Without a constructive power in the mind to make models of experience, get hunches and follow them out, play freely around with hypotheses, and so forth, no scientist could get anywhere. But all imaginative effort in practical fields has to meet the test of practicability, otherwise it’s discarded. The imagination in literature has no such test to meet. You don’t relate it directly to life or reality: you relate works of literature… to each other. Whatever value there is in studying literature, cultural or practical, comes from the total body of our reading, the castle of words we’ve built, and keep adding new wings to all the time. As for us, we can’t even speak of think or comprehend even our own experience except within the limits of our own power over words, and those limits have been established for us by our great writers.

From The Educated Imagination and Other Writings on Critical Theory: 1933-1963 (2006) by literary critic Northrop Frye.

Read related posts: The Power of Literature
Great Literature Speaks
Why Read Dickens?
The Benefits of Reading

The Benefits of Reading

In the film, Shadowlands, Anthony Hopkins playing the brilliant professor and author, C. S. Lewis, observes: “We read to know that we are not alone.” Little does he know how right he is — and now there is solid research to back him up.

Two researchers, Emanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd, social psychologists at the New School for Social Research (New York City) wanted to know how reading directly influenced people’s perceptions; specifically, how does reading literary fiction, popular fiction, or nonfiction change a person’s level of empathy? The researchers recruited subjects (customers of Amazon.com) and had them read short sections (2-3 minutes) from well-known fiction and nonfiction works. After the participants finished their reading assignments they took a number of tests that accurately measured their to read social or emotional cues.

The researchers published the results of their study in Science in a report titled “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind.” “Theory of mind” is a psychological concept that describes a person’s ability to understand that others have different beliefs and aspirations and that these may differ from their own. The new research provides empirical evidence that reading passages of literary fiction, that focus on a subject’s thoughts and inner feelings, increases a reader’s theory of mind tasks, i.e., empathy, emotional intelligence, and social perception.

Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist at Cambridge University, praises the researchers for their findings: “It’s a really important result. That they would have subjects read for three to five minutes and that they would get these results is astonishing… and to demonstrate that [literary fiction] has different effects from the other forms of reading [ — popular fiction and nonfiction — ] is remarkable.

While popular fiction is more focused on plot and exterior reality, literary fiction is more introspective — focusing on characters and their inner thoughts and feelings. Kidd elaborates: “[The popular fiction] author is in control, and the reader has a more passive role. [In literary fiction novels] there is no single, overarching authorial voice. Each character presents a different version of reality, and they aren’t necessarily reliable. You have to participate as a reader in this dialectic, which is really something you have to do in real life.”

Castano and Kidd’s study results, underscoring the value of the humanities, couldn’t come at a better time. In a report titled “The Heart of the Matter (June, 2013),” the American Academy of Arts and Sciences states: “At the very moment when China and some European nations are seeking to replicate our model of broad education in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences as a stimulus to innovation and a source of social cohesion, we are instead narrowing our focus and abandoning our sense of what education has been and should continue to be – our sense of what makes America great.” The report argues that the humanities should be a foundational aspect of a college education; specifically the report notes “college and university curricula must also offer the broad-gauged, integrative courses on which liberal education can be grounded, and such foundations need to be offered by compelling teachers.”

And what could be more compelling than reading to understand and empathize with our fellow man? Perhaps we should add to C.S. Lewis’s observation, “And we read to become better human beings.” Class dismissed.

Read related posts: Why Read Dickens?
The Power of Literature

For further reading: sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377.abstract
well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/i-know-how-youre-feeling-i-read-chekhov/
insidehighered.com/news/2013/06/19/new-academy-arts-and-sciences-report-stresses-importance-humanities-and-social