Is Great Literature Worth Reading?

Most people today live complex lives. Who has time to read? More than that, who has time to read old books? If such few people can be convinced to read any book at all, how could anybody be convinced to read Anna Karenina or The Grapes of Wrath? Perhaps the works are too old, boring, or no longer relevant. I think many people neglect Great Books because they have no idea what they’re missing. They are content with Netflix specials and Hulu binges, as they try to forget about today and stave off tomorrow.

Let me offer you a brief overview of the reasons why Great Books are timeless classics that you ought to read and cherish today––from the very voices of C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) and Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586).

C. S. Lewis: Literature Expands Your Life Experience

Literature give you an experience beyond yourself. Similar to a captivating film, excellent fiction will make you entirely forget about your own life until you are released from the enchanting grip. What sets great works apart from ordinary books is that Great Books enrich you and expand your range of experience. They are considered great because they have proven to be achievements of mastery in the craft, swooning readers for centuries and across cultures. As C. S. Lewis says,

“[W]e seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself. And even when we build disinterested fantasies, they are saturated with, and limited by, our own psychology. To acquiesce in this particularity on the sensuous level—in other words, not to discount perspective—­would be lunacy. . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. . . . One of the things we feel after reading a great work is ‘I have got out’. Or from another point of view, ‘I have got in’; pierced the shell of some other monad and discovered what it is like inside. Good reading, therefore, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three. . . . Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it.’ (C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 137-8.)

For Lewis, this is not primarily to gain mere knowledge, but true experience.

“This must not be understood as if I were making the literature of power once more into a department within the literature of knowledge––a department which existed to gratify our rational curiosity about other people’s psychology. It is not a question of knowing (in that sense) at all. . . . Not only nor chiefly in order to see what they are like but in order to see what they see, to occupy, for a while, their seat in the great theatre, to use their spectacles and be made free of whatever insights, joys, terrors, wonders, or merriment those spectacles reveal. Hence it is irrelevant whether the mood expressed in a poem was truly and historically the poet’s own or one that he also had imagined. What matters is his power to make us live it.” (Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, 139.)

Even if the works depict worlds that are fanciful, like Dante’s Inferno or Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the participation and contact with another human being’s imagination, vision and perspective is a liberating event. Lewis concludes by pointing out the difference between people who read and people who do not.

“Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. . . . Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. . . . [I]n 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. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” (Lewis, 140-141.)

For Lewis, literature is about pulling us out of ourselves and into alternate realities. This enriches us and allows us to escape from the “prison” of our own limited and feeble experience or perspective. It is only here, when our conscience is temporarily relinquished of its normal functions to entertain the ideas of an author, that we can enjoy the benefits of another’s outlook.