Opinion: Why reading books makes us kinder, wiser—more in tune with life
Image by André-Pierre du Plessis
Peggy Noonan at the WSJ analyzes today's culture of lightning-fast news and social media sound bytes—and why good literature, even (and especially) in the 21st century, makes us more perceptive. So we wonder if SJ's homelessness funds might be better allocated if pols, you know, paged through some Dostoyevsky.
I start the year with some things I know because life and a few geniuses taught me. They’re things often at the back of my mind. …
Reading deepens. Social media keeps you where you are. Reading makes your mind do work. You have to follow the plot, imagine what the ballroom looked like, figure the motivations of the characters—I understand what Gatsby wants! All this makes your brain and soul develop the habit of generous and imaginative thinking. Social media is passive. The pictures, reels and comments demand nothing, develop nothing. They give you sensations, but the sensations never get deeper. Social media gets you stuck in you. Reading is a rocket ship, new worlds.
A century ago in a short story, F. Scott Fitzgerald said the rich are different from you and me. Ernest Hemingway is said to have mocked him: Sure, they have more money. But Fitzgerald’s point wasn’t a romantic one. He said that something in the experience of the rich “makes them soft where we are hard” and hard where we are soft. That’s true, can be unpacked forever, and applies even to our politics. On crime and illegal immigration, the private-school-educated bail-reform scholar or the wealthy donor to nonprofits is soft where we are hard. Crime and chaos can’t hurt the rich the way they hurt others. Money changes people because it changes experience.
A paraphrase of C.S. Lewis: Empires rise and fall, great nations come and go, but the man who poured your coffee this morning is immortal, because his soul is immortal. That is a world-altering thought and one that, if you keep it in the center of your mind, will modify how you treat others.
Clichéd phrases endure for a reason. Don’t be embarrassed by them. The other night a big-brained writer texted to tell me about a packed theater as the movie neared its end. “You could’ve heard a pin drop.” Some genius made that up centuries ago, and people still use it because it says it all.
Read the whole thing here.
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