Why are we still doing this?

On literature as a lifeline and the nature of reading

“And why are you still doing that?” asked Dave, my mother’s partner, mid-margarita at the local Mexican restaurant after I explained why I don’t own a television: I’d rather be reading. “No one reads books anymore. That’s not the cool thing anymore.” I was inclined to cheekily ask in return how a sixty-six-year-old man determined what did and did not qualify as “the cool thing,” but bit my tongue knowing full well that reading is not, in fact, in the cool thing, and probably never was.

A strange thing happens when someone asks you to explain the most fundamental aspects of your personhood—you can’t do it. The answer feels so self-evident that it becomes inexplicable. I sat in that red pleather booth, twice-bitten taco in hand, at a loss for words, all the more confounded because the very topic of conversation should have given me all the words I needed. Why am I still doing that, reading? Dave might as well have asked me why I’m left-handed. I just…am.

And so this essay is an attempt to answer that question, not only for myself, but for all of us magnetically attracted to the written word even as it becomes increasingly undervalued and increasingly uncool, because someone will inevitably ask. Why are we still doing this?

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In his 1943 essay “Why I Write,” George Orwell states, after listing the earnest but oft-abandoned literary activities of his youth:

I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development.

I agree, and would extend this to readers as well as writers, seeing as they are usually one and the same. It’s rare, though certainly not impossible, for a deep dedication to and appreciation of literature to emerge in a person who had no childhood interest whatsoever in reading, particularly in this era when we have more media available to consume than Orwell ever could have imagined. (That said, I suspect that those who do find literature later in life can be, and are, its fiercest supporters. They understand the contrast.)

Before I was really even conscious, my mother made damn sure I’d become bookish by reading to me almost immediately after we returned home from the maternity ward and didn’t stop until I took the books from her hands and insisted on reading them to myself, not that I was exactly fluent at four. I thank her for building the foundation of everything I am today (so take this up with her, Dave). At this point, reading to me was nothing more than the imaginative play you’d expect of a little girl who insists on wearing princess dresses and is positive she just saw a fairy in the backyard.

“Portrait of Duranty,” Edgar Degas

It wasn’t until elementary and middle school, circa fourth grade to sixth, that reading took on a quality not of escapism, but of survival. I was around eight years old when my social anxiety disorder took hold, by my present-day estimation at least, though I wouldn’t be diagnosed until I was twelve. The anxiety manifested as selective mutism; I didn’t speak in school. Ever. You can imagine what this does to a kid’s social development.

I couldn’t speak, but I could read, and read I did. Harry Potter. Inkheart. Uglies. A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I maintain is the best children’s series. Looking back, I don’t think these books offered an escape route from my circumstances, nor replaced them, but allowed me to experience aspects of life I could have lived had I been a slightly different person. I didn’t consider Harry, Ron, and Hermione “my” friends, but I first felt the bonds of friendship as them, which I could not do as myself with my classmates. I didn’t vanquish dastardly adults with the Beaudelaire children so much as I sharpened my own mystery-solving skills through them (and inadvertently developed a penchant for wordplay and irony) while precisely zero opportunities for adventure presented themselves in real life.

No, reading was not an escape from the world, or addition to the world, or consolation for the world. Reading was the world. I could either read a book or be alone. The choice was obvious.

Why am I still doing this? I’m no longer twelve. My world is less silent and more populated, if only slightly. But as Orwell suggests, childhood influences on a reader/writer don’t disappear after childhood ends, and may in fact be integral to the adult’s motivations.

I would say that literature is still the world, though less in a “I have nothing if I’m not reading” way, and thank the good Lord for that. But I can’t deny that being massively behind my peers in the social sphere has put me in the state of the perpetual observer, always standing just outside the action, analyzing, rarely participating. If all the world’s a stage, then I’m the local critic sitting in the loge taking notes. I suspect this is why I write nonfiction and not poetry.

If I’m to be the perpetual observer, then I need lenses through which to observe—secondary sources, something to compare my own view to.

In 1924 the English writer, poet, and gardener Vita Sackville-West wrote a strange little novella called Seducers in Ecuador, wherein one Arthur Lomax’s life is forever altered when he dons a pair of blue spectacles while traveling in Egypt. The world becomes a magical and curious place with its new blue hue, and Lomax gets hooked on looking through colored lenses—black, blue, amber, green—switching them out to suit the moment. Each shade reveals a new world and a new Lomax, for his actions and interactions depend on how the world appears:

“He was, then, wearing his black spectacles when he came on Miss Whitaker sobbing in the verandah.

The black ones were, at the moment, his favourites. You know the lull that comes over the world at the hour of the solar eclipse? How the birds themselves cease to sing, and go to roost? … How all is hushed before the superstition of impending disaster? So, at will, it was with Lomax.

‘Oh,’ she said, looking up at last, ‘do for goodness’ sake take off those horrid spectacles.’ …But he knew that if he took them off, Miss Whitaker would immediately become intolerable.”

Sackville-West didn’t intend, I’m sure, to write an allegory for reading—the story ends in disaster—but it’s what always comes to mind when I try to explain why I’m still doing this. Every book, every author, is a different pair of colored glasses, changing how we see, feel, think. Who can read Woolf and not be overcome by the blistering aliveness of a single moment? Who can read Dickinson and not be drawn to contemplate the inscrutable minutiae of the everyday? Who can read Dante and not long for God?

The difference between literature and lenses, of course, is that you can take off your glasses, but you can’t unread a book. Every literary encounter adds a new shade to your stack of spectacles, altering all that came before and will come after. The more shades you stack, the more intricate your outlook becomes, the more unique. Imagine walking through life with just one pair of eyes! You’d never capture all there is to see.

Might I recommend pink lenses, which make every hour golden hour.

There’s an Umbert Eco quote that regularly makes its internet rounds:

“He who does not read, at 70 years will have lived only one life, his own! He who reads, will have lived 5000 years: He was there when Cain killed Abel, when Renzo married Lucia, when Leopardi admired infinity... Because “Reading is backward immortality”.

Though its precise source is questionable, its point is so irrefutable that it borders on cliche; of course the transportive, vicarious nature of reading multiplies one’s life. How could it not? When the reward for reading is 5000 lives and 5000 lenses, what more can I say to answer our ultimate question?

And yet, as I begin to wrap up this essai, this attempt, I remain unsatisfied. Our answers thus far reside exclusively in our own minds; we need to reach outside them and concretely connect to something larger than ourselves.

So here’s my unified theory of why we’re still doing this: Every book, every lens, every life gives us a new way to touch each other and our world. I’m not sure I could have learned to do this without reading. Because I was ejected from Milton’s Eden with Adam and Eve, I’m searching for a partner with whom to navigate the unknown future, “hand in hand.” Because I studied dialogue with Socrates and Plato, I can prompt a friend to question his beliefs and interrogate my own. Because I watched wild geese with Mary Oliver, I feed my backyard birds and, for a moment, feel at home.

That’s why I’m still doing this. To anyone who feels the need to question a reader, I ask in return: Why aren’t you?

Thank you for making it all the way to the end! Please feel free to respond in the comments why you are “still doing this.” I’m curious to know where our reasoning matches and differs 💜

A note for paid subscribers! Your first “epilogue” of journaling questions and further reading recommendations will go live tomorrow, due to a slight change in formatting. Turns out the Substack learning curve is steeper than I thought 😅. I’ll see you then!

Until next time,

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