Purpose of Reading
From the moment we learn to recognise letters, we are taught again and again that reading is important. To drive the point home, many school systems force teenagers to read classic literature that is far beyond their comprehension. Sure, they can read and understand the words on the pages, but at that age they couldn’t care less about the significance of characters, plots, metaphors and allegories. Yet we are taught that reading is important.
But if it is so important, how come no one ever tells us why?
Force-feeding breeds repulsion
Setting aside the fact that educational systems have a habit of omitting the ‘why’ of any subject (that is another discussion for another time), parents and teachers often cannot explain why reading is so important. Failing to see why it should matter, many adolescents give up on it. They hate the literature they were forced to read, so now there is no one to force them anymore, why bother?
And I can’t blame them. I was one of them for the longest time. After I left secondary school, I read no more than a handful of novels in the decade that followed.
I did read non-fiction, though. In fact, I devoured books on history, wars, myths, symbolism, different cultures and religions, more history, art, law, psychology, astronomy, biology, geography. The list goes on. To this day, more than half my book collection consists of non-fiction books.
And I watched TV. Not sitcoms or soaps, but documentaries, whodunits and movies of all kinds. Okay, and several pulp series that are the TV equivalent of beach reading. We all do J!
Then I passed 30 and a lot of movies began to bore me. I saw the conclusion of most thrillers coming for miles and the increasing dramatization of documentaries got on my nerves. Basic science doesn’t go through fundamental changes (I never did have any interest in computer sciences), so my non-fiction books brought little new. For lack of anything better, I went back to reading novels.
Thou Shalt Read!
By this time, the guilt instilled by the holy commandment of ‘thou shalt read books to further oneself’ had set in deep. I hadn’t touched a novel in years, despite having been raised on the premise that you cannot call yourself educated unless you have read at least half of the great classics, as well as three times that many contemporary novels. I didn’t know where people found the time to do that, but clearly I was not at all well-read.
From ‘having to’ to ‘wanting to’
To my surprise, I found that my memories of reading fiction were no longer valid. Where my 18-year-old self didn’t have the experience to understand the big works of literature, my 30+ year-old self got a much better grasp. And more besides.
In every novel I read, I found something to relate to. I found characters who made choices teenagers cannot fathom, but which anyone with a bit of life experience could understand, even if they do not agree. I saw plot devices that I had dissected from the many movies I had watched, and understood the foreshadowing of events because I knew the patterns of nature and of history (which, indeed, tends to repeat itself). Now it all made sense!
But there were also events, emotions and choices that were new to me. Things I never experienced myself – thank goodness! – but which became a part of me because I read about them. With every novel, I learned more about different kinds of people and their behaviour, like I had learned about the world from reading non-fiction books.
In the end, that is why reading is important.
Reading as a substitute for experience
Reading books – any books! – helps us understand experiences we haven’t had. Travelling to faraway countries isn’t an option for everyone, so we read about them instead. Going back in history or forward in time isn’t possible at all (as I write this, anyway), so we read about how the world may be, or might have been. We read about ideas we would never have considered ourselves, and thus learn about options we never knew existed. And through words, we can experience terrible events that we would never want to experience in person, but which are real or could be real nonetheless.
Experience comes with age, comes with action, but since no person can make all mistakes and have every success themselves, we share our experiences. In books, so that others can benefit from what we have learned.
Experience teaches us what wisdom is. By extension, so does reading.
