Being Able To Read Is An absolute Privilege
The question: ‘Why should we read?’ is tricky to answer. Readers who are already immersed in the pleasures of reading usually struggle to articulate it, while people who don’t understand this pleasure feel the pressure to read more without really knowing why.
I too struggle with this question even after studying literature for years. At the start, I followed my love for reading without ever questioning it. ‘One day, all this reading will be worth it,” I thought when I was struggling through some of the tough early days of Austen and Shakespeare.
But as I got older, the practicalities of life started to weigh in and forced me to put every pastime on trial. I paused my piano lessons because it became way too time-consuming and stopped putting much time into photography before my honour’s year. But reading as a pastime slipped past all the practicalities, absolved itself from all justifications and always had its space on a Saturday night away from campus.
And on one of these Saturday nights, instead of picking up a book, I started watching a movie named The Professor and the Madman and during a scene where the mad doctor (confined to a psychiatric prison) tried to teach a woman how to read, he equated reading with freedom, for he could “fly out of this place on the backs of books” and has “gone to the end of the world on the wings of words”. Without knowing it at the time, this scene from the movie clarified my answer to the question ‘Why should we read’ a little more.
This is how I see it now. Being able to read is the greatest privilege because it is the antidote to fear and as a result, it gives us perspective and freedom. Generally speaking, fear arises out of a lack of understanding. Sometimes we find ourselves in a space where we don’t know who to trust, what to think and how to make sense of an aspect of life. And if we don’t know how to read and evaluate anything around us, we’re doomed to side with a narrow perspective while remaining afraid.
But imagine how we’d feel when we know how to read. Imagine not being afraid of a long article in a journal because we can finish it and produce an informed opinion. Imagine being able to enjoy art and architecture on a deeper dimension after consulting a few biographies and history books. Imagine dropping into a different world so that our reality temporarily disappears, and imagine training your mind with works of philosophy so that one day you’ll be immune from fallacies and dogmas. When all these benefits of reading work together, our minds are liberated. One day we’ll look up from our books and realise that reading’s end goal isn’t to keep us trapped within the margins, but to return zeal, curiosity and a sense of ease to the world we used to regard with fear. And after just a little glimpse of this power of reading, it becomes impossible to stop.
All this is accompanied by an optimistic sense that reading will become more and more pleasurable the more we practice it. A few months ago, I joined my university’s Dante reading group and within a few weeks, I realized that the Dante I’m reading now was no longer the Dante I read when I was sixteen. The book changed, and the poetry took on new colours and emotional charge. What flew over my head completely during my first vulgar reading started to reveal itself, and this encouraged me to slow down because I knew in five years, the book would change into a different book again. This cycle of gradual reveals never ends because reading good books is supposed to take a lifetime, and this cycle has produced some of the greatest pleasure I’ve ever experienced.
And this is why I think being able to read is such a privilege. Frankly, it’s a miracle in print. Now, what about you? What excited you about reading?
