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The Importance of Reading Literature

Prompt: In what ways do you think reading literature enhances your outlook on life?

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The question of what reading does for the human soul is an old one, almost as old as the time when the human beings discovered writing. From then on, the value of reading literature has become enormous as is expands empathy and mental powers and ennobles the inner life, providing the readers with a simulation of real life, while informing and entertaining them.

For me literature is more than entertainment. It is therapy; it is schooling; it is a response to the human fallibility. It helps us live and die with a bit more rationality, understanding, wisdom, and appreciation of life. It allows us to consider events from someone else's point of view and shows us the results of our actions on people in a way we wouldn't grasp otherwise. As Emerson said, "In the works of great writers, we find our own neglected thoughts."

Reading literature is a cure for loneliness. Writers of great literature open our hearts and minds to ourselves and show us who or what we are, so we can travel through our experiences without feeling so abandoned, as sometimes we are reluctant or unable to say or even admit to ourselves what's really on our minds or what it is that is facing us.

Reading literature helps us to become nicer as it is opposed to the main value system of the society, which rewards power and money. Great stories and poetry make us more concerned and appreciative of important ideas and feelings that are not cynical, commercial, or status-oriented. They give us examples of kind, generous, lovable people to emulate, in contrast to the more negative materialistic ones.

Reading literature prepares us for success and failure. Through what we read, we learn not to judge harshly our own failures and not to gloat over our little successes. It gives access to a wide range of emotions and events and lets us peek into numerous situations that we wouldn't have time to experience in one lifetime. In this way, reading literature is a time-expender. It is as if we live many lifetimes in just one lifetime.

In short, the great books that we read serve as tools by letting us live our lives with more sanity, goodness, understanding, and wisdom.