These are my notes from a plenary talk I gave at the Southeastern Consortium of Classical Educators in Raleigh, NC earlier this month.
It was a chilly November in 2053 when Leonard Mead took his regular evening stroll for the very last time. In fact, he had strolled the empty streets of his city each evening for nearly ten years, always without incident. But this night…
This night would be different. Mead had joyfully walked to his hearts’ content and was on his way home when, less than a block from his destination, he was stopped by the police. Unable to justify his reason for walking—walking to see, he explained; walking to enjoy the fresh air, walking nowhere in particular, he claimed; walking just because he was a human being with two legs capable of walking—Leonard Mead was arrested by a technopomorphic, self-driving police car. At the threat of being shot by the robot authorities, Mead climbed into the car under protest, and it silently took him to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.
Ray Bradbury wrote The Pedestrian in 1951. It probably seemed far out at the time, a really strange story about an average man being accosted by an unmanned, robot car for simply doing a normal human thing: walking just because it brought him pleasure.
And, although it might be startling if something like that happened to one of us today, it probably wouldn’t sound quite as abnormal, I think—not like it would have in 1951. Today, it might feel eerily similar to being arrested for singing in church without a mask or being arrested for sharing your unpopular opinion on social media. My, haven’t we “progressed” a long way in 75 years?
Progress notwithstanding, there is a human experience some folks from 2026 would still find very similar to folks in 1951. Like Mead’s walking habit, every reader… since at least the Enlightenment… has experienced, at some time or another, the need to justify his reading habits. I’m not talking about justifying the timing or the selection of the literature being read, necessarily. There might be legitimate reasons for those questions in certain contexts—like why Susie is reading The Vampire Diaries in study hall when she should be studying her Latin.
But the utilitarians among us, and even that cold utilitarian that lurks within each of us, at some point or another compels us to justify our purpose for reading literature at all.
The critic demands to know, Why are you wasting valuable time reading fiction or poetry? That’s time that could be used much more productively, don’t you think? If you find that you have to read, you could be reading something “strictly educational,” or at least “overtly moralizing.” Better yet, you could be using that time for chores, for work, for getting ahead, for turning a profit. Have you seen your task list recently? What gives, loafer? (At least that’s how my inner critic speaks to me.)
When the critics “critic,” how do you answer? What is your most satisfying justification for reading literature? Before you answer, may I remind you, that even the esteemed W. H. Auden once mused that “When one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one.”
Perhaps your answer might be—and of course you would answer in your most pious tone—”Well, for the sheer pleasure of this good story or this beautiful poem!” You say.
“Ha!” says C. S. Lewis, suddenly peering from around the corner of one of your dusty memory banks, that one that contains the vague memory of reading his An Experiment in Criticism in college:
“The real objection to a merely hedonistic theory of literature, or of the arts in general,” begins Lewis, pointing the glowing end of his half-smoked cigarette at you, “is that ‘pleasure’ is a very high, and therefore very empty, abstraction. It denotes too many things and connotes too little. If you tell me that something is a pleasure, I do not know whether it is more like revenge, or buttered toast, or success, or adoration, or relief from danger, or a good scratch. You will have to say that literature gives, not just pleasure, but the particular pleasure proper to it; and it is in defining this ‘proper pleasure’ that all your real work will have to be done. By the time you have finished, the fact that you used the word pleasure at the outset will not seem very important.
“Fine!” you answer, unfazed by the fact that C. S. Lewis just emerged from the annals of recent history to speak directly to you in your braincase. Mustering a slightly more honorable reason, you answer: “I’m reading for no reason in particular; I read because I am a human being capable of reading. And, that’s that!” you say, confidently hiding the fact that you are still unsatisfied with that answer yourself.
“Well, off you go,” says Ray Bradbury, leaping up from behind your left occipito-temporal-fissure. “Perhaps, it’s time you pay a visit to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies.”
“That’s right!” chimes some unknown and bespectacled, cognitive scientist that suddenly appears to be standing just behind Bradbury’s right shoulder in a white coat and holding a clip board. Stepping around Bradbury, and nudging him aside as he peers first at the clipboard then back at you, he continues: “the tale of reading begins when the retina receives photons reflected off the written page. But the retina is not a homogeneous sensor. Only its central part, called the fovea, is dense in high-resolution cells sensitive to incoming light, while the rest of the retina has a coarser resolution. The fovea, which occupies about 15 degrees of the visual field, is the only part of the retina that is genuinely useful for reading.”
“Wait!” You interrupt, annoyed that these critics, who suddenly seem more real and weighty for some reason, have interrupted your reading time—and right when you were at the good part, about to find out who really killed Smith—his betrayed and jealous wife, his illicit lover, or the secret cabal that he had double crossed.
“Can you just get to your point?” you calmly ask the cognitive scientist through your grit teeth and conjured smile.
“Well, to skip over the process and get to the point, brain imaging suggests there is a cerebral organ for reading even though there’s not been sufficient evolutionary time for one to develop, since humans have only been reading for a few thousand years. Evolutionary change moves at a much slower rate…”
Suddenly, a burst of loud laughter coming from somewhere much deeper in your mind, overpowers the silly scientist and echoes through your head. As the laughter slows, the same voice, now sounding a little shrill asks, “Didn’t I tell all of you where this ‘writing’ would lead? Remember the mythos… Remember Theuth and King Thamus… said the voice now fading into silence… now familiar to you as Socrates.
“Fine,” you tell your inner critic as you regulate yourself with a few deep breaths. “Here’s my best answer, my best justification for reading literature—Socrates notwithstanding:” “Reading literature allows the clean sea breeze of the centuries to blow through my stifled modern mind,” you answer.
Maybe this conversation feels somewhat familiar to you, or maybe I am just a maniac, but I can say with certainty, the need to apologize for our writing and reading of literature goes back a long way. And I use apologize in its more formal and rhetorical sense—to give an answer for our position. As was previously noted, Socrates famously objected to writing in general. And as late as the 17th century, John Bunyan penned in verse his famous apology for the Pilgrim’s Progress to answer his critics:
May I not write in such a style as this?
In such a method, too, and yet not miss
My end--thy good? Why may it not be done?
Dark clouds bring waters, when the bright bring none.
Yea, dark or bright, if they their silver drops
Cause to descend, the earth, by yielding crops,
Gives praise to both, and carpeth not at either,
But treasures up the fruit they yield together;
Yea, so commixes both, that in her fruit
None can distinguish this from that: they suit
Her well when hungry; but, if she be full,
She spews out both, and makes their blessings null.
My point is, despite a long history with the critics—be those critics around us or be it the one lurking within us—literary people find great joy in reading literature and it’s not always easy to say why. It’s not always easy to justify that joy.
To merely say literature brings us pleasure, isn’t enough to silence the critics. We need meaningful language.