Opening the world through books

To read or not to read ““ that is the question. But it should be a choice so obvious that even Prince Hamlet could decide.

If the rather pessimistic statistics are to be believed, pleasure reading is already far along its way in decline. A 2007 Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that a bit more than a quarter of American adults didn’t read a single book in the past year. Apparently, the only book we’re genuinely interested in reading is Facebook.

But reading for pleasure may not always be possible, even for students who are genuinely interested, because of the realities of one’s course load. And that should be a major cause for concern.

This is not a matter of rhapsodizing about the erudite pleasures of musty, leaf pages or empty moralizing on the virtue of reading.

The truth is that pleasure reading is far more than simple catharsis: It’s a genuinely serious business. It keeps our heads on straight by broadening our perspective of the world.

There should be a key distinction made between reading for pleasure and reading for class. Although both are beneficial, reading for pleasure is more rewarding because it’s more like a dialogue than a lecture. When reading a book for class, there is pressure to simply understand what the book has to say about itself. But when reading for pleasure, that same book challenges the reader to understand its relation to the reader, and to the world.

To be sure, reading for pleasure has very tangible benefits. An Oxford study conducted last month collected responses from more than 17,000 adults born in 1970 concerning their extra-curricular activities as teenagers. The study found that reading for pleasure was the only variable statistically associated with finding a managerial or professional job later on in life.

But the true benefits of reading run deeper than landing a job.

Reading destabilizes what we are automatically and most unconsciously sure of: that we are the center of the cosmos because everything we perceive is relative to ourselves. Keats had a fitting metaphor for this sort of existence. He compares the human life to a mansion with many apartments. The first room, the “thoughtless Chamber,” is one in which we are born into ““ and remain in if we do not choose to leave it.

But reading a book offers us an important choice: the choice to move past the “thoughtless Chamber” by enabling us to peer outside the blind prisons of our “me-centered” realities. Reading is truly seeing through a glass, dimly.

In short, reading lets you understand that there are billions of others out there with realities every bit as real as yours.

And if you’re consciously aware of a universe outside your own, then the daily inconveniences, such as getting handed a flyer on Bruinwalk, suddenly become infinitely more beautiful and significant.

As we read Shakespeare for pleasure, we allow the characters to freely speak to us. As their motivations and morality become complicated, nuanced and contradictory, we realize it in ourselves.

These intensely complex, psychological struggles of Shakespeare’s characters are surprisingly relevant to modern readers. Every generation has claimed and understood Hamlet in its own terms. Though culture is in constant flux, humans are still made of the same winding helixes, leading us in circles asking, “What does it all mean?” What we discover within Shakespeare’s works, as in all great literature, is that our lasting problems in life have no answers, or at least no satisfying ones.

But when you know for a fact that what you believe in isn’t 100 percent the truth, that’s probably when you’re the closest to it.
Literature is a conversation whose subject will always be humanity. It has been since the beginning, when the serpent promises Eve that if she were to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, “Ye shall be as gods.” And then, you imagine yourself falling, over and again.

Because in the end, the secret to enjoying literature is that it’s not about “literature.” It’s about us. And that is why we need to read.