We often encounter people who believe reading books is a waste of time. Sometimes these are powerful people who implicitly tell us that “Look at me. Look what I have achieved without reading.” Given that many readers tend to be introverted, intellectual types, the prevailing atmosphere in capital markets across the world for several decades now has been to celebrate the do-er rather than the reader & thinker. So, does reading have any ROI (Return on Investment) for us bookish types? That’s the question, Flora Champy, associate professor of French at Princeton University, answers in this long read for Aeon.
Ms Champy’s essay gives us three sets of benefits that all of us can avail of by reading books. She sources the first set of benefits from Marcel Proust’s essay ‘On Reading’. Proust was opposed to the utilitarian idea that you should read books in order to have better conversations with other sophisticated people. Proust believed that this sort of practical view of reading missed the whole point of the exercise. Ms Champy writes:
“Proust …found it preposterous to recommend reading as a valuable access point to a world of wisdom – akin to thinking you could access truth through ‘recommendation letters’. In response, his own defence of reading makes no concessions to the cost/benefit mindset and owes nothing to financial or conversational analogies. In his view, it is futile to praise reading as an encounter with great minds. What happens in reading is substantially different from what happens in social life, where speech is always subject to social constraints. By contrast, a reader enjoys the utmost freedom to find the greatest writers boring, or to appreciate them for his own purposes, which may be utterly at odds with what they intended. Books do not create a higher form of conversation but instead allow for a unique ‘fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude’. Great writers do not reveal to us the admirable depth of their minds: they guide us in cultivating the ability to make sense of words, and things.
In this sense, books connect us with the richest part of ourselves. The meaning we attach to words as we read is uniquely connected to our experience – it can never be replicated. This is how reading becomes, in Proust’s view, the fullest, most concrete mediation to our sensations. And it allows us to expand our experience beyond all measure when it lets us enter into contact with the past. When we read age-old texts …managing to make sense of them beyond the evolution in language and customs, we have access to nothing less than immortality.”
Ms Champy turns to the English writer and art critic, John Ruskin’s, point of view to help us understand the second set of benefit around reading. [Note: these views are in direct opposition to Proust’s point of view.] Ms Champy writes:
“In the postwar era, while fashion dictated that academic literary criticism took a distinctly anti-utilitarian approach to reading, the idea that great books positively contribute to moral education remained a driving force in public education, fulfilling a promise of social ascension for many low-middle-class families…
It may, then, not be that surprising to see moralising return in full force in the 21st century…This can in part be explained by the digital revolution: we are much more likely to spend our leisure time with screens than with books, and online formats make it easier to focus commentary on morals rather than style. The resulting alarm over decreasing literacy has led to no shortage of zealous defences of reading, which, like most matters of opinion today, fall rather neatly along political divides.
In short, conservatives praise ‘great books’ for teaching good morals and a sense of beauty, while progressives criticise the canon for its lack of representativeness, championing reading mostly as a training in empathy for underrepresented groups. In the former camp, Emily Finley, writing in The Wall Street Journal, recommends that children read ‘old’ books (pre-1940) to build up adequate protection against dangerous impulses, such as imagining that happiness can be found outside of religious and conjugal duties. On the other side, Patricia Matthew in The Atlantic advocates revisiting our definitions of what makes a ‘great’ writer – targeting Jane Austen for the conventionality of her writing as well as her ties to the transatlantic slave trade.
These takes ultimately consider books as some sort of processed foods for thought, telling us in advance what we are supposed to glean from what we read.”
The third and most fascinating set of benefits of reading hinge around our ability to participate in the political world around us. Drawing on the work done by the French political theorist Anne Louise Germaine de Staël 200 years ago, Ms Champy writes:
“In her groundbreaking work Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions (1800), Madame de Staël argued that literature was now irreversibly part and parcel of political life, and was just as influential on religion, customs and laws as it was shaped by them….Fiction, she said, actively contributes to collective improvement because it works directly on shared representations – thereby contributing to national unity. She believed that politics depended on the specificity of languages, each one bearing a world of its own in itself. Within each nation, therefore, literary fiction provides a common ground that every member of the nation can relate to, whereas real situations are either too close or too remote to allow for a secure understanding…
However, Staël adds another layer by emphasising the political consequences of literary appreciation. Crucially, she believed that, by sharpening the use of language, literature prepares citizens for potential participation in government – an essential feature in countries on the way to becoming more and more democratic: ‘The progress of literature, i.e. the perfectioning of the art of thinking and expressing our thoughts, is necessary for establishing and preserving liberty.’ In effect, Staël argued that literature sets us free by developing a non-predictable use of language, away from governmental reach.”
In this age of social media, self-censorship and cyber surveillance, this set of benefits from reading appear to us to be priceless.
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