Why Read?

On why it's worthwhile to pick up a book

“No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

…

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.”

I had originally planned on writing a different essay for the month of February, but alas, I realized it was a bigger topic than I was equipped to handle. It will require me to read some philosophy books and that is always a daunting task. So I’ve fobbed it off for another month and this article will cover something different. But to whet your appetite (and encourage me to actually write the darn thing) I’ll let you look behind the curtain on what it was going to be over. I had an interesting conversation with a good friend of mine (read argument, but that’s what makes him such a good friend) about the nature of man: whether man in his essence is both spirit and corporeal; if he is does one aspect take priority over another or are they equal; and how should we organize society in relation to this based on what we believe. Now that that’s out of the way we can proceed with the topic at hand.

The quotation at the beginning of my piece is from a poem called No Man is an Island by John Donne, the last line of which is one of the most well known in English poetry. The meaning of Donne’s poem is easily perceived: man does not exist as an insular entity, he is part of a larger living consciousness on the whole, mankind. We cannot live in a vacuum and the sufferings (and death) of one of our members comes as a blow to the whole organism. This idea is seen across times, cultures, and ideologies: from Hazlitt to Dostoevsky; Communism to Christianity. It is not my intention to rehash this already much discussed idea, rather I want to explore an alternative application of this thought and how it allows one to participate in the shared consciousness of mankind across generations. 

Donne says “no man is an island.” I say “no book is an island.” For books cannot exist in a vacuum either. And by books, I mean specifically novels, poems, plays, in a word, literature. They are the vehicles by which all of mankind’s thought is carried. They are the scaffolding on which all of human history, its loves, hates, hopes, and ideas, is built. All scientific knowledge, in fact all knowledge, builds on itself. We could have no antibiotics if we did not understand there are bacteria. We could not understand bacteria without a microscope. We could not understand a microscope if we did not understand light and its properties. And so on and so on. In just the same way human thought, human experience, builds upon itself. And books allow one to trace the development of mankind’s thought through the ages, and by tracing it, experiencing it. For instance, if you were to read the Aeneid you would be participating in the shared experience of not only humans contemporary to you, but with the Romans of Virgil’s day. When you read of Aeneas arriving in Carthage wrapped in a cloud (mirabile dictu) and behold his astonishment, you are sharing in the very same feeling that Roman senators reclining at table felt. You are connected to them across thousands of miles and years. And yet you are connected to them through the written word, you share humanity with them. Or again, who remains unmoved when the valiant Hector, after taking leave of Andromache, goes to fight Achilles. Who can restrain the throbbing of their heart when Priam, in begging for the return of his son’s body, kisses the very hands of the man who murdered his son! And you share these emotions with the Greeks of Homer’s day all because they were written down.

But books aren’t merely a vessel that allows a modern to live vicariously through those who came before. They are also the means by which we understand the values and mores of civilizations that came before us, and by extension better understand ourselves. If we want to make sense the horrors of World War One and why so many countries allowed themselves to be pulled into the fighting we would do better to read the novels of the years preceding 1914 than to read the history textbooks. If you want to know what motivated the chivalric spirit of the aristocracy during the 15th century you would find a better answer by reading La Morte D’Arthur and Roman de la Rose over a dry court chronicle. What a people values is what they put in their stories. No amount of abolitionist tracts carried the weight of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  

Which brings us to my humble little substack. I don’t know if any of you wondered why I named it The Palimpsest. In fact, I spent a fair amount of time trying to decide on a name for it. I hoped to embody my beliefs in the name and what I hoped to convey to any readers. A palimpsest is a technical term for a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. That is precisely what I hope for my substack to be. A place where what I write retains vestiges of what came before me and that by retaining these faint glimmers of previous works my readers would be spurred on to read those masterpieces for themselves, and by so doing share in the universal mankind.

I once heard a girl brag that she didn’t read. I’ve hardly heard a comment that has left me more saddened. It is as if a paraplegic proudly boasted of cutting off their own legs. By doing so she has deprived herself not only of participating in the universal brotherhood of man, but she has also stunted her own understanding of herself. If each man’s death diminishes me, how much will each unread book diminish me? 

Happy Reading,

Drew