Reading in a Pandemic is Everything

How can letters on a page or screen produce such enormous ripples in people’s hearts, minds, and spirits? Why do we lose ourselves in books, only to find ourselves enlarged, enraptured, transformed?

When you want to escape, dream, ponder, wonder, think, or imagine, it’s to the written word that you turn. Ever since Gilgamesh, stories have fed humanity’s irrepressible hunger for truth and meaning, and some of the most celebrated exemplars of our species have extolled reading as a pillar of our very humanity:

• Galileo: “What sublimity of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of place and time!”
• Neil Gaiman: “When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world, and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You’re being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you’re going to be slightly changed.”
• Franz Kafka: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
• C.S. Lewis: “But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a 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.”
• Ana?s Nin: “It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love.”
• Gwendolyn Brooks: “Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.”
• Marcel Proust: “I realized that the essential book, the one true book, is one that the great writer does not need to invent, in the current sense of the word, since it already exists in every one of us—he has only to translate it. The task and the duty of a writer are those of a translator.”
• Denise Levertov: “I do not believe that a violent imitation of the horrors of our times is the concern of poetry. I long for poems of an inner harmony in utter contrast to the chaos in which they exist. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”
• Carl Sagan: “What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

And there are many more great thinkers, great writers, who tell us why we read, why we write, why we, as Sagan said, work magic with words. But are these notions relevant in a pandemic? When stepping outside one’s home could literally be a matter of life or death? What need do we have, with our horror-heightened senses, in our fear-drenched environment, to read other people’s stories?

The answer is, of course, that there are no other people’s stories. As Gaiman and Nin and Lewis and Proust and others say, over and over again, the writer’s work is to show us something about ourselves.

We have to always remember why people read. They read to learn something new about themselves or the world. Whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, that’s why they read. Even escapist fiction teaches us about ourselves; we learn through others’ stories. If I am going through a hard time, I want to read what it was that got the author or the protagonist through their hard time. They don’t have to be the same hard time; I’m looking for tools rather than facts. I don’t need to read about how people survived a pandemic; but I do need to read about how people survive hardship.

“The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us,” James Baldwin wrote. But he went on to add it that is especially so “when something awful is happening to a civilization.” These days certainly qualify.

The pandemic will end, eventually. But its repercussions won’t be measured in years, they will be measured in decades—if not in centuries.

Which is why reading now, and continuing to read, is a radical act. It means caring about other people. It means entering into their stories in order to find our own, to find our commonalities, to find our brotherhood: it is, I would argue, life itself.