On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

by reading widely, voraciously, and indiscriminately, I learned spiritual lessons I never learned in church or Sunday school, as well as emotional and intellectual lessons that I would never have encountered within the realm of my lived experience.

virtue. Because the world since the fall contains both good and evil, Milton says, virtue consists of choosing good over evil. Milton distinguishes between the innocent, who know no evil, and the virtuous, who know what evil is and elect to do good.

What better way to learn the difference between evil and good, Milton argues, than to gain knowledge of both through reading widely: “Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.”1

The attentiveness necessary for deep reading (the kind of reading we practice in reading literary works as opposed to skimming news stories or reading instructions) requires patience. The skills of interpretation and evaluation require prudence. Even the simple decision to set aside time to read in a world rife with so many other choices competing for our attention requires a kind of temperance.

Practice makes perfect, but pleasure makes practice more likely, so read something enjoyable.4 If a book is so agonizing that you avoid reading it, put it down and pick up one that brings you pleasure. Life is too short and books are too plentiful not to.

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.

In other words, plot reveals character. And the act of judging the character of a character shapes the reader’s own character.

Through the imagination, readers identify with the character, learning about human nature and their own nature through their reactions to the vicarious experience.

Our desires as human beings are shaped by both knowledge and experience. And to read a work of literature is to have a kind of experience and to gain knowledge.

we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: “the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life .

“Although the best writers of literature demonstrate a phenomenal control over their language, associations escape, rhythms beat out older and more sacred patterns, and words carry memories of previous use.”29 Words carry resonances that spill beyond the bounds of logic and even conscious thought.

But even this brief examination shows how literary writing—all literary writing, not just poetry—uses language in a way that relies on layers of memory, meaning, and associations that can be objectively supported once explicated.

Literature is birthed from our fallenness: without the fall, there would be no story. “Only desire speaks,” writes Jacques Ellul in The Humiliation of the Word. “Satisfaction is silence.”34 Thus it is the nature of literature to express—and cultivate—desire. Marcel Proust says that “it is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books . . . to provide us with desires.”35

Indeed, “Our hearts traffic in stories,” James K. A. Smith writes in Imagining the Kingdom. “We are narrative animals whose very orientation to the world is fundamentally shaped by stories.”40 We see this storied aspect of our lives in the most mundane, everyday ways—for example, when a loved one relays a funny or interesting incident, not by rushing to the outcome but by re-creating the whole scene, narrating it from start to finish in the form of an entertaining story.

Training our affect, or emotions, is a way of shaping our very perceptions, of “training people to ‘see situations in the right way.’”41 Developing perceptiveness—the sort that literary reading requires—cultivates virtue because action follows affective response.

We have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial. Literature extends it, making us reflect and feel about what might otherwise be too distant for feeling. . . .

Richard Baxter: “Good books are a very great mercy to the world.”51

No matter what, adhering to rules is much easier than exercising wisdom.

Virtue requires judgment, and judgment requires prudence. Prudence is wisdom in practice. It is the habit of discerning the “true good in every circumstance” and “the right means of achieving it.”1 In other words, it is “applied morality.”

While philosophers rightly hold that virtue is developed through actual practice—by which habits become tendencies, which become instincts, which then become essential nature—literature provides a vicarious practice of virtue.

Another example is the rule among some male leaders not to meet alone with a woman, which sounds moral and wise but generally becomes impossible to practice without falling into other errors such as disrespect or discrimination. Yet many today assume its prudence and adopt the rule without examination. Prudence is wisdom at work on the ground, doing good and avoiding evil in real-life situations.

When virtue is used as a euphemism for virginity, it’s inevitable that the concept of virtue is depleted, its practice diminished, and the virginity for which it stands commodified and fetishized.

his reading of the novel effectively demonstrates how easily morality slips into moralism, how finely drawn the line is between the law and legalism, and how readily the promise of blessings is mistaken as a contract for material prosperity.

This fact points to an interesting quality of vice: it is just as likely to be accidental as intentional. In this way, virtue opposes vice not only in its moral content but in its acquisition as well. Vice is natural to human beings in their fallen state. But virtue must be practiced, become a habit, and be inhabited by a person in order to attain excellence.

Loving oneself in proper proportion is necessary to loving others well.

for when a man lays the foundation of his own ruin, others will, I am afraid, be too apt to build upon it.”34

Prudence concerns the “realities of a life lived within a specific and communal history, wisdom which proceeds to act.”38 It is exercised “within the mix of specific relations and goods that give the moral life of any person its texture. . . . Hence prudence responds specifically to the concrete particularities of one’s life.”39 In other words, applying wisdom requires the ability to discern truth and then to act rightly based on truth.

One attains the virtue of temperance when one’s appetites have been shaped such that one’s very desires are in proper order and proportion.

Temperance is liberating because it “allows us to be masters of our pleasure instead of becoming its slaves.”9

Today conspicuous consumption has spread even more throughout American culture. A recent four-year study, for example, found that the lives of the middle class are “overwhelmed” by stockpiled supplies, clutter, and toys. Three out of four garages are too full to hold cars, and while the United States has 3.1 percent of the world’s children,

Nick recognizes the fatal nature of this intemperate world when he observes that in it “are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy, and the tired.”28 Consumption does indeed consume us.

“The past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.”1 When we are born into a community, we are shaped by that community’s past as much as its present.

Justice is the mean between selfishness and selflessness. That mean has implications within political, economic, social, and racial realms, just as it has implications for the inner life of the soul.

to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer, and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer’s boy of sixpence.”16 Yet such extreme penalties do not even serve as a deterrent to crime. Indeed, “the fact was exactly the reverse.”17

It is also why Augustine, more wisely, says that “a law that is not just does not seem to me to be a law.”20

When the justice system becomes a form of entertainment, it surely is unjust. This is as true of the ancient Roman coliseum as it is of twentieth-century American public lynchings and of today’s trials by public shaming on social media.

For this horrific rape and its consequences illustrate how all injustice works: the injustice of one person against another cannot be contained. Injustice, no matter how seemingly private, always has public consequences.

As Martin Luther King Jr. would exclaim a century later, in response to the societal admonition to “wait” longer for justice: “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”35

Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.37

Justice avoids both selflessness and selfishness. Only when one attains this virtuous mean can one be just within oneself, and within one’s community, for justice is about giving everyone his or her due: oneself, others, and God.

But even forgiveness cannot negate the ripple effects of the past. To pretend otherwise is itself a further injustice.

With the endless injustices and causes that overwhelm us today, it’s common for us to set these concerns against one another as though one cause must compete against another: we must choose the cause of women or the poor, of religious liberty or the environment. We often think of justice as parcels of land, and we concern ourselves with the size and distribution of its lots. But justice is less like finite land and more like the wildflowers that grow there, continually spreading as they bloom and re-seed themselves. Justice—like beauty—is rooted in infinity.

I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. . . . It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

The person who is virtuously courageous displays not merely a single act of courage but the habit of courage. Courage—or fortitude, as it is often called—is defined most succinctly by moral philosophers and theologians as the habit that enables a person to face difficulties well.

Courage is getting your heart in the right place at the right time despite the obstacles.

prayer isn’t about changing one’s circumstance but about changing one’s heart.

In contrast to this scene of mob cowardice, two years before, a lone woman wearing climbing gear and a helmet scaled a thirty-foot flagpole at her state capitol and carried down the flag symbolizing the state’s racist past. Upon returning to the ground, the courageous Bree Newsome surrendered—willingly, head held high—to the authorities waiting to arrest her.

Aristotle says that “it is for the sake of what is noble that the courageous person stands his ground.”

Such acts cannot be considered virtuous and therefore are not acts of courage. Courage must always be connected to a just end.

Taking a risk isn’t virtuous if done merely out of inclination without intending some good. Not only is the ability to reason necessary in establishing what is just, but it is also the faculty that produces fear in a dangerous situation. Reason recognizes and acknowledges risk.