"People read for a multiplicity of reasons. Nearly forty years in I can tell you why I inhale books like oxygen: I am grateful for my one life, but I'd prefer to live a thousand - and my favorite books allow me to experience more on the page than I could in my actual life. A good book allows me to step into another world, to experience people and places and situations foreign to my own day to day experience.
In books we encounter those things first, vicariously experiencing rites of passage on the page long before we live them for ourselves - we fall in love, or suffer a bad breakup; we lose a beloved pet, or a parent. We go to college, take on a new job, fight with a roommate, bicker with a spouse.
Books draw us deeply into the lives of others, showing us the world through someone else's eyes, page after page.
Books provide a safe place to encounter new and unfamiliar situations, to practice living in unfamiliar environments, to test drive encounters with new people and new experiences. Through our reading we learn to process triumph and fear and loss and sadness, to deal with annoying siblings or friend drama or something much much worse. And when we get tot hat point in our real life when it's happening to US it's not so unfamiliar.
We've been there before, in a book."
There is so much truth to this. I have considered also, what are the ramifications then of not reading widely and well. What happens when you have a population reading less and less each year? This is not so much an academic question as a social and emotional one. We are not short of information. Data is at our fingertips. We can easily pull it up there if we have not memorized it from a text. I am thinking more of the impact that reading - particularly literature and biography - has on our emotional intelligence, our EQ as it has been coined. Our perspective is shaped and tweaked as we see our theories tested out in the pages of other lives. They don't always work the way we predict. We discover new twists, new sides of things which had not occurred to us.
We can't know what we don't know, after all.
If books provide us with insight into other's experiences and a way to vicariously experience things that our own situations do not permit, what happens when we have fewer and fewer of those opportunities?
That`s also one of my favorite reasons to read - to live through faraway adventures and situations and see the world and life through someone elses eyes. That makes life so much richer and more beautiful!
I`m afraid you`re right - with less and less reading and with less and less really good books and movies, our emotional intelligence and the ability to "feel, how it is to be in someone else`s shoes" is lacking more and more.
Also that`s one of the reasons, why we, as society, have less and less people who are ready to preserve through very difficult times, to keep on trying even when it feels hopeless, to stay on a good path even when it looks like the most stupid choice at the moment.
We need this perspective of others, who have done it and gone through it or worse, to trust that we also can. If we lack this - lack contact with elderly relatives, or in inspiring books - than we have much less resilience.
Very interesting perspective. Thank you!
Posted by: Luana | February 01, 2021 at 05:16 PM