These are my notes from a plenary talk I gave at the Southeastern Consortium of Classical Educators in Raleigh, NC earlier this month.
Did you miss the first two installments? Read them here:
There is a joy that comes from being well read that allows a person to be able to converse on a broader range of topics. Another way we can say this is we all enjoy being able to get all the jokes and pick up on all the allusions.
Perhaps it’s one of the reasons trivia board games and trivia game shows have always been so popular. And, maybe you’ve experienced a group of friends speaking to each other almost exclusively by referencing literary characters or quoting movie lines. You know, like: No more rhymes and I mean it! (iykyk).
There is a third joy we get from literature, the joy that comes from communing with great thinkers, discussing ideas with the democracy of the dead, as Chesterton called them; or to self-plagiarize, there is a joy the comes from communing in our soul garden, our florilegium of friends, our compendium of companions.
If, perhaps, you think this is an overstatement, then have you really ever sat down with Plato, with Saint Augustine, with Boethius, with Dante, with Machiavelli? Speaking of… perhaps you recall the ceremony that Machiavelli underwent before entering his own library and study each evening. In the introduction to The Prince, he recounts:
When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men,where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.
Only in a book could any of us sit boldly and confidently at the feet of masters like Marcus Aurelius or Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Karl Barth. Only through attentive reading can any of us have such a one-on-one conversation with the greats where they “patiently bear all the scrutiny” we choose to give them. Only through literature will what the medievals’ called the auctors, the authoritative authors, answer my questions or explain to me their deepest understandings of the human condition.
A fourth kind of joy we get from reading literature comes from defining “the particular pleasure” C. S. Lewis previously told us we’d have to work for. He calls it the pleasure of “enlargement.” This “enlargement,” Lewis says, is a kind of healing. He explains that “individuality” is both a wound and a privilege; in other words, we are sealed within a single person. I am the only me there is; that is the privilege; yet, I can only see the world from my perspective, through my own eyes; that is the wound.
This “wound” is the kind of prison that makes us small minded as individuals. Lewis further claims the only other way out of the wound of our individuality is through mass emotion, mob mentality, where we take on what today psychologists call “group think.” The problem is that mass emotion heals the wound by destroying the privilege, the privilege of being myself. Said another way, only by means of the mob mentality, by giving myself over to the crowd’s ecstasy can I escape the wound of my individuality.
While this is one way to “heal” the wound, it does so by dissolving the individual into a pool of sub-individuality (i.e., we become mere pellets in the mob beanbag of belonging). Literature, he argues, heals the wound another way: in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. The joy of reading well, Lewis argues, is in the enlargement of our being.
At this juncture, an inclusio is inevitable. It seems impossible to avoid tying Lewis’s idea of “the enlargement of our being” back to Berry’s “literary necessity.” And herein lies the greatest joy, I think, for most literary people, something I’m going to call for the purpose of this talk, the humanizing work of “self-recognition.” Perhaps there’s a better modern word or expression, but one escapes me at present. I’m talking about the Delphic oracle: γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnōthi seauton).
I’m talking about the ability to perceive ourselves as particular individuals in the stream of our inherited culture. In other words, in literature we encounter the thoughts and opinions, the votes—if we want to use Chesterton’s imagery—of all who came before us.
We are part of a tradition, whether we know it or not—and whether we like it or not. We are who we are, having been shaped, in part, by the decisions of those who came before us. Reading their thoughts—the literature—be it non-fiction or imaginative, allows us to peer into the otherness of past generations and see something of ourselves. We see their mistakes. We see their successes. We aspire, we correct, we renew, we discover more keenly our own possibilities of happiness and flourishing.
I agree wholeheartedly with Arnold Weinstein, the professor of literature at Brown University for more than 50 years, who says, “literature is miraculous; it has the ability to capture life between two covers… life itself flows into and onto the pages of the books we read, and then flows into us.”
Weinstein further argues that literature is unique among the arts in that it consists of symbols formed on paper with ink which become the “transcription of human life into language.” To get at what he means, we might use the metaphor of a colonizer. Because real life is not language, writers serve as colonizers. They conquer worlds and bring them into language, and by sharing them with us, they make these conquered worlds available to us.
Similarly, but using different language, Weinstein is simply echoing Lewis’s “enlargement of being” theory, when he concludes that
In real life, we are locked into our own bodies and minds. All the rest—the reality of others—is, to some extent, guesswork for us. Literature opens up a world that would otherwise be opaque and unknowable and enables us to explore our own inner reaches… it shows us something about the many directions in which the inner life moves… a plenary view of life—the interplay between hidden thoughts and spoken words, the effects of the environment, the incidents and accidents of existence.
Without literature, we are simply not equipped to get this view on our own. And, it’s in knowing by way of this dynamic that we are experiencing its greatest joy.
In closing, I need to point out an area where I might have misled you slightly. And the clarification is partly the reason some people never discover the joy of literature, the reason why some are not what Lewis called “literary people.”
In the beginning, I compared walking with reading, but later I also alluded to the fact that writing and reading are not as natural as walking. There’s some truth to that. Writing and reading require the use of symbols. We must learn to code and decode the symbols to write and to read. To do that well takes years of training and directed attention, something our screen-obsessed generation has little time and use for.
Lewis has much more to say about why some people don’t experience joy in reading literature in his book, Experiment in Criticism, but I’ll leave you with a few points you can stick in your notebook for further reflection:
There is a tendency for humans to use literature (i.e., overt moral formation, work, etc.). Lewis distinguishes between the reader who uses a book and the reader who receives it… This is Augustine’s distinction between what we use and what we enjoy; his uti/frui distinction in De Doctrina Christiana.
Some readers get crushed by “the Vigilants” (e.g., The Harold Blooms of the literary world) and become cynical.
Too many are distracted by and addicted to the algorithm. Ephemeral entertainment produces dopamine hits which works counter to developing directed attention.
Some have never been given the affirmation to read at Whim (See Alan Jacobs The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. C. S. Lewis said everything was made available to him as a child.
Some people were not read to as children. This is where a person needs to train themselves to read intentionally, and with grit, until it becomes enjoyable. And it will become enjoyable if one reads the right books.
Literature, received rather than consumed, trains the affections to enjoy the right things rightly and so belongs to the formation of the whole person.
Oh, and by the way, Bradbury wrote another short story significantly relevant to this week. It was August 5, 2026 when the house in the original publication of There Will Come Soft Rains burnt down.
I’ve attached both short stories here so you can read them.
