I want to address the role of culture, and specifically literature, in bringing comfort and solace to people (specifically me, since this is, well, my personal blog).
I read literature, the so called “classics”, because they hold within them kernels of wisdom. The edges of those pages are dotted with my annotations and notes. I find little bits of advice that resonate something important. I can read a book different times and in different moods and find that the meaning changes, what I find was previously overlooked.
This quote I particularly liked from Aldous Huxley’s The Genius and the Goddess, “That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors” (pg 47, Huxley, Harper Perennial). I think this is true enough, to say something obvious. We often grapple with complex feelings and have only clichéd avenues of expressing them.
This is why I am partial to another de Botton quote from The Consolations of Philosophy:
“It is tempting to quote authors when they express our very own thoughts but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we cannot match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What is shy and confused in us is succinctly and elegantly phrased in them, our pencil lines and annotations in the margins of their books and our borrowings from them indicating where we find a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our own minds are made” (pg 161, de Botton, Vintage).
These are a few reasons I enjoy reading. I find scattered pieces of myself and others I know in the works of those far brighter than I, and far older. Like those who look up to the sky and know how small they truly are, so too does literature and philosophy remind me how little I really know.
Do you have a favorite quote or book? Please share it with me.
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