On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

Reading well adds to our life—not in the way a tool from the hardware store adds to our life, for a tool does us no good once lost or broken, but in the way a friendship adds to our life, altering us forever.

Virtuous courage, in contrast, is more than boldness for boldness’s sake. Courage is measured not by the risk it entails but by the good it preserves.

Courage requires putting a greater good before a lesser good. Courage is getting your heart in the right place at the right time despite the obstacles.

We can understand a great deal about a culture—its strengths, its weaknesses, its blind spots, and its struggles—when we examine the literature that it not only produces but reveres.

There is perhaps no more apt object of pity than he who thinks himself exceptional but turns out to be merely ordinary. The tragedy, of course, is not in failing to be exceptional but in the greater loss of rejecting the glories of everyday gifts.

When love is unmoored from unchanging truth, it becomes mere sentiment or tenderness. Sentiment and tenderness are opposed to suffering and can do anything to avoid pain. And the only end to earthly pain is death. Tenderness prefers death over suffering. Charity chooses to “suffer with,” the literal meaning of compassion.

Paradoxically, then, the busiest people can be the most slothful. Frenetic activity can be what most effectively keeps us from what we are supposed to be doing, particularly seeking God and his righteousness. Being busy is easier than being good.