Why We Read (and Write)

A Love Letter to You, Whoever You Are

I think of this quote often:

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading…is the search for a difficult pleasure.

That’s Harold Bloom. He was some sort of genius. Probably a madman too. I don’t understand half of what he says, but the half I understand resonates with me deeply.

And that’s why we read. And write. For that resonance. That feeling that we’re not alone. That someone understands us. Someone is like us. That maybe we can be friends. If the writer has passed on, that maybe we would have been friends.

But as Bloom says, how many can we really know deeply? How many do we want to know so intimately? We want to know only so far as we can keep from becoming consumed and ruined by that knowledge. As Solzhenitsyn said, the dividing line between good and evil runs right through every human heart and the only person equipped to deal with the full scope of darkness in each of us is God Himself. But we can handle some of it. We can take that darkness on, look it square in the face, begin to fight it and heal the scars it leaves. Not fully. Not on our own. We are not called to save anyone. But we are called to help. Reading helps us to do this. We cannot love without understanding and we cannot have understanding without someone baring their heart and soul to us.

That baring can be unbearable if we are not equipped to deal with it. Stories enable us to deal with the world because we can vicariously experience action on the moral plane on which life operates. It is one thing to be told something, to be admonished about proper action, to have some idealized plan. But things inevitably go wrong when we smack into the wall that is Reality. Good stories that are True show us people who are like us, or unlike us, or totally alien to us, coming into contact with that Reality, rid of illusion, facing the consequences of their actions and the vagaries of Fate or, if you prefer the inscrutabilities of Providence. In short, good stories teach us how to conduct ourselves in the world. Either through imitation or avoidance. They warn caution or they inspire growth. The best of them teach us how to love.

This is knowledge of the way things are. The trappings of genre and such make no difference to this. Stories set in Middle Earth or Outer Space or other dimensions can be just as True as something near-memoir. What matters is how real the people are. What kind of fine texture the writer gives them. That you can feel for what their heart longs, what quickens their pulse, what spurs them to dream, what drives their blood to boiling. What they think, feel, crave, hate, adore, run from. How they look and smell and maybe even how it would feel if you hugged them. If you sat and talked over a drink.

And in this we take pleasure. As readers and writers. This is our great task. To create and to find in books people as real as ourselves, though we made them up together. It is a deep pleasure. And it is a difficult one. It is difficult because life is difficult. And encountering Reality in a story means encountering all the mess that is life. The violence, the joy, the confusion, the pain, the transcendence, and the we-hope-only-temporary descent into darkness. But sometimes the descent is permanent. If we have met a real person in a book, then we weep for that tragedy, as we rejoice over the triumph of another.

And this difficult pleasure is the highest motive because it is the one that brings the truth of a good book into the truth of our real lives. As I writer I want to give you those books that are a difficult pleasure. I want to delight you, to make you think, to be a source of fun and also sometimes of solemnity. I want you to meet people as real as yourself. People who have something to say to you. People who you can love. I want you to enjoy what I write. As I enjoy what countless others have written. Writing is an act of service, a gifting, and reading a grateful acceptance of that gift.

And I want to do this because on some level I love you. Even though I may not know you. Our writing and reading are a way of extending a relationship over time and space that is not otherwise possible. It lacks the depth of face to face presence in some ways, and goes beyond it in others. It is not a replacement for companionship in the flesh, but an adjunct to it. And in some ways a thing unto itself. I love my friends, my family, but I wouldn’t want to be without my favorite writers either. And I know on some level they wrote those books because they also love me.

But perhaps you the reader, or they the writers, may be my enemies. I hope, at least, I can understand them then. Forgive them, as I am called by my Lord to do. I and those who take my creed must learn to love our enemies too. If I write something that puts me in that camp, I ask you try and do the same.

Because in the end that is the aim of this whole project. Reconciliation, peace, glorification of all that is good and holy. Exposure of darkness and the wounds it causes and the healing thereof.

In a word, love. We read to learn how to love. We write to learn how to love. We live to learn how to love. And we will fail. And we will triumph. And we will keep a beautiful record of it all in our reading and writing.

And then one day we will see it all clearly, even as we glimpse now only dimly through the glass.

The world is made whole by the Word.