Literary Links

Over the past weeks I have been discussing the importance of reading. Research continues to highlight the enormous benefits of reading for pleasure. Young people need stories to make sense of themselves and their world. They dream in story, daydream in story, remember, hope, believe, doubt, learn and love in story. Encounters with books – as well as being sites for enjoyment, and critical and creative thinking – play a significant role in the formation of one’s identity. Marcel Proust, one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century states, ‘Every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self’.

The following text is an exploration of the power of reading by Gabriel Garcia, a Year 12 English Extension 1 student.

C.S. Lewis asserts that reading is a 'primary impulse' in which individuals 'maintain and aggrandise' their self, entering an 'extension of being'. Across time and context, many great writers have identified the act of reading as a necessary precept for self-actualisation. Author Donna Tartt shares this impression in her 1992 novel, The Secret History, revealing our intrinsic yearning for an ‘escape’ from the ‘cognitive mode of experience to transcend the accident of one’s moment of being’. Reading allows our consciousness to become saturated with purpose, so that the ‘accident’ of being is replaced with an intentional liberation from our own consciousness, into that of another. Once we realise that reading offers a state of being beyond the temporal, the physical and the tangible, it transforms from an ‘impulse’, becoming an insatiable hunger for a more protean, more lucid experience of the world.

Yet reading also exposes us to the limitations of language. We can only read what is written, and language, in its compression and illusiveness can fail to free us into a larger world, thus suffocating the imaginative, inquisitive mind. Reading can become distant and alienating when it cannot reach out into the depths of our most obstinate, most tenacious emotions. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke laments in his Duino Elegies: ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of the angels?’

Reading is an active, cognitive experience, and a means to affirm ontological existence, as it facilitates an interaction between the individuated 'self', and the possibilities existing within the limitations of a text and its language. It is a broadening, reshaping, and reconstitution of the components of one's selfhood, so that the expansion of one's consciousness moves from the internal to the external. In essence, reading is seeing meanings to see ourselves. Writers like Lewis have viewed reading as empathetic because it facilitates what the Greeks termed 'henosis', a primordial unity, where individuals are microcosms reflecting the fundamental order of the universe, or macrocosm. Through reading, individual experiences unite with the broader, universal human condition, so that infinite perspectives are unified in the encounter of texts. By its nature, reading is unifying; it is receptive yet generative, intimate yet provocative.

Reading is therefore an act of simultaneous encounter and retreat: we approach language in anticipation, yet we are thrust into frustration when it fails to express the intricacies of our individual experiences – unable to ‘utter the unutterable’. This discordance begs a reconciliation: How are we to unify our experience of reading and responding?

Polish author and Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk ‘dreams of a language that is capable of expressing the vaguest intuition’, believing that ‘seeing everything means recognising the ultimate fact that all things that exist are mutually connected into a single whole, even if the connections between them are not yet known to us.’ Perhaps we must realise that the impenetrable and the unknown do not alienate but unify, and that our individual experiences are not meant to be complete. Perhaps our experiences constitute a universal reality, where ‘seeing everything also means a completely different kind of responsibility for the world, because it becomes obvious that every gesture “here” is connected to a gesture “there”, that a decision taken in one part of the world will have an effect in another part of it, and that differentiating between “mine” and “yours” starts to be debatable…’.

                      Gabriel Garcia

As we come to the end of the term, I would encourage all – parents, teachers, and students – to spend some quiet time with a good book. A good book is indeed, ‘a uniquely portable magic.’ As Virginia Woolf, another influential twentieth century writer muses, ‘Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexpected reading.’

Wishing everyone a very Happy Easter. May the Risen Lord bless us with His peace and bring us new life.

Clare Murphy

English Coordinator and Literacy Instructional Coach