Why Reading Matters

Something about this US election is making me want to encourage everyone to read more literature. I'm going to write down some things I've been thinking for years. I'm not sure if this will be of any use to anybody, but I figure it can't hurt to share.

The point of reading is not just to learn stuff or be entertained. You will forget most of what you learn and most of what entertains you. Knowledge and entertainment are flimsy, fleeting things. They come. They go. And when they go, you will be left sitting in a chair, searching for the next distraction from the pain you're in.

Reading is difficult because it requires you to make so many decisions. The whole time you read, you have to continuously decide to not stop reading. Then you have to decide what each word means. Then you have to decide how the meaning of that word relates to the rest of the words around it. Then you have to decide the purpose of each paragraph or stanza, and you have to figure out how it relates to all the other paragraphs or stanzas. Sometimes, when you can't figure out what something means, you have to accept your confusion and press on.

It's easier to just not read. It's easier to let a video wash over you. Here is why. Visual entertainment requires very little of you. If you stop thinking, the video keeps happening. You can passively receive it. If you stop reading, the story stops, too. With reading, you're completely in charge of the experience. Your brain is churning. You're working. It's tough. There is nothing passive about it.

But the more you do it, the more your brain habituates that meaning-making mode. You start to interpret life actively. You naturally ask questions, piece things together, decide what makes sense, decide what doesn't. If you read enough, then your brain becomes inherently critical, which is the opposite of passive.

So even if you forget most of what you read, the practice of reading will make you harder to manipulate, since you will be used to doing the hard work of interpreting. The less you read, the easier you are to manipulate, since your brain gets accustomed to being a passive receptacle of images and information. You simply don't have to work as hard to consume a video than you do when you consume written language, and the hard work of reading is exactly the thing that will keep your mind potent, independent, critical, and growing.

But a more critical mind is not the main reason I'm encouraging you to keep reading during this era of endless entertainment. I'm encouraging you to keep reading because you are sometimes going to feel brutally, severely alone. And when writers use language to try to capture what it feels like to be alive, you can catch a glimpse of yourself in their language, and you can realize, in a really powerful way, that others have felt just as alone as you are feeling, and you can connect with those writers across time and space, and you can be together with them in your aloneness.

There is a reason that the dictators always burn and ban literature. When people read literature, they encounter the human experience in a uniquely intimate way. The reader envisions what it is like to be inside another body, since the language within a book emerged from within another body, the author's body. And when people do this regularly, they develop a deep empathy. Empathetic people do not want to fall in line with violent leaders. They do not want to be manipulated into hurting people. They understand that every human life is as potent and vivid as their own.

So keep reading. Your brain will work better. And you will be harder to manipulate. And you will be less alone.