Why Should We Read Old Books?

Why Should We Read Books by Dead, White, European Males?

As an undergraduate at the University of California in the late sixties and early seventies, I recall sitting in a drama survey class where we had been assigned to read Macbeth. The discussion in class began something like this:
The Teaching Assistant (gamely): “Well, class, what do you think about the play? Gripping, isn’t it?”
A Student: “I didn’t read the dead white man’s play because I couldn’t relate to it.”
The Teaching Assistant (somewhat abashed): “You couldn’t relate to it? What do you mean by that? In what way were you unable to relate to the play?”
The Student (defiantly): “I couldn’t relate to it in any way. It’s not about my people. It’s about a bunch of long dead, high class nobles in a white European hegemonic culture hundreds of years ago. I feel nothing in common with any of these people.”
The remainder of the class period didn’t go particularly well for the TA, because he wasn’t ready for that kind of resistance. The student’s objection—that a Shakespeare play was inaccessible to a modern student because it was written many years ago by a now long-dead white man—had simply never occurred to the TA.

We Read Because We Find Ourselves There

I’ve thought about this argument against reading DWEMs (Dead, White, European Males) for many years, and, noting that the same objections are still being raised against DWEM works, I thought it was time to post a response. First, we can relate to these people, beyond their historical periods and cultures regardless of our gender, ethnicity, or cultural background. Shakespeare’s plays are really only marginally about kings and courts and England at the end of the sixteenth century. The plays are really about the human nature that we all share—the conflicts (internal and external), temptations, aspirations, hopes and fears—and about the problems we all face when virtue swerves down the icy, curvy road of temptation. As we read, we do indeed see how one character relates to another in a long-gone social situation, but we also experience the highly relevant testing of values, where loyalty, honesty, integrity, and faith are all set in tension with betrayal, cheating, selfishness, and greed. Contests between the proud and the humble, the giving and the self-serving—these tell us about ourselves, regardless of where we are placed in time or culture.
The argument above is sometimes summarized by the saying, “We read because we find ourselves there.” Yes, often the characters need a change of costume or era to make them fully familiar to us, but ultimately we may find that, mutatis mutandis, we are very like Young Marlowe in Joseph Conrad’s Youth—or we want to be more like him. The necessary mental adjustments simply strengthen our creative thinking. When we find characters we can relate to, characters who share our values, we can consider how they make decisions, how they discover alternatives, solve problems, act quickly or delay to deliberate. And who hasn’t, at one time or another, felt the inner conflict between duty and desire that commonly confronts the characters in the works of fiction?
The first reason we should read old books, then, is that we do so in order to feel human, possibly even normal, to recognize our own feelings and thoughts, fears and hopes, ambitions and hesitations through those we read about. When, in a literary work, we identify with a character whose situation or problem resembles our own, we feel a sense of belonging, perhaps not to that setting of time and place but to the world, to the human race. By reading we lose the sense of aloneness and alienation with which modernity has plagued so many people.

We Read Because We Don’t Find Ourselves There

The second reason for reading plays and novels written by DWEMs, is, paradoxically, “We read because we don’t find ourselves there.” There has been a trend in publishing for the youth market to feature characters who are poor, abused, victimized, or otherwise suffering, propelled by the thinking that young readers who share these miseries will feel less alienated and less freakish by encountering in books characters with the same experiences. But many children want the opposite. They love fairy tales with handsome princes and beautiful maidens (often in need of rescuing) simply because such tales allow them to leave behind their problems for a while and enter a world of adventure where happiness and justice, goodness and peace reign at the end. And with older readers, if you consider the market for romance novels and thrillers, combined with the obsession with books about vampires and zombies, you can understand this appetite for escapist literature: many people do not want to read about ordinary lives with ordinary challenges such as their own; they want to escape into a realm where an imaginary hero has supplied a model to emulate or who represents a quality they can value. (In the absence of good parenting, some children find their mentors in books.) At the same time, these readers can take note of the full degree of evil and degradation some characters descend into, together with the tragic consequences. Both the hero and the villain might be completely foreign to the reader’s personal experience, but both can be instructive about integrity perseverance, slippery slopes, or compromising with evil.
We read about characters and circumstances that are very different from our lives because we gain insights into ourselves and into the possibilities for additional life choices that we might make. Like travel, reading broadens our outlook and gives us a better, more circumspect view of life. We find options, possibilities, choices we never might have thought about otherwise. And with a little imagination, we can translate even very different circumstances into some idea relevant to us. We might not have a personal tailor who presses us to wear larger epaulets, but we can use the incident to reflect on dress and how clothing symbolizes something about ourselves, our attitudes, our values, and who we are. We might not see 18th century fops anymore, but we do know about those who overdress to impress to the point of self-mockery.
Suppose you read about a character who lives in a mansion and employs forty servants, Not your life experience, eh? But can you put yourself imaginatively in his shoes and ask yourself how you would live? How would you treat your servants? How would you run the household? What can these answers tell you about your own character?

Reading—Especially Reading Old Books—Offers Priceless Gifts

Here are some of the gifts offered by reading literature. Those who want to have them must read with care and thoughtfulness.

1. Enjoyment.Novels and plays and poems offer the pleasure of reading, whether the reader likes thriller plots, the creative use of language, life adventures, romantic encounters, or the overall presentation of social, technical, or personal world views. Humor, comedy, horror, tragedy—choose the genre you like. While television and film cover many of the same ideas, those ideas when presented in a book allow our imagination to partner with the story by creating in our minds the scenes, character attributes (looks, physical form, personality) and details not included in the text itself. Exercising our creativity is certainly enjoyable; but more importantly, it expands our imagination and thinking ability.

Study the beauty of language in the Richard Whitford translation of Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ, or in Richard deBury’s Philobiblon, or the condensed, vivid, delightful imagery in the poetry of John Donne or George Herbert, or, yes, William Shakespeare. The more you read, the more you will learn. The more you learn, the more you can enjoy.

2. The safety of vicarious experience.Literary works open up the possibility of examining various possible life choices and beliefs. We can see the success or failure of different characters and how their personal values contribute to their triumph or downfall. Books provide us with models (characters whom the author holds up for imitation) and anti-models (characters whom the author presents as cautionary figures whose choices should be avoided). And they help us, as Rasselas says, “in the choice of life.” We can’t all in one life become mountain climbers, race car drivers, cave explorers, surfers, jet pilots, archaeologists, magicians, doctors, and spies; but we can through literature experience each one of these roles—all in the safety of our living room sofa—and decide which if any to pursue for our life’s work.
3. Instruction.Literary works provide readers with instruction in several areas. Yes, it cannot be denied that the best literary works are indeed didactic. They have something worth teaching us.
4. Whether we read a play like Hamlet or Macbeth, a novel likeGreat Expectations, a poem likeParadise Lost, an apologue like Rasselas, or a work of non-fiction like Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations or Pascal’s Pensees, or the Bible, we can see, understand, and learn about ourselves and others and about how to live a life of integrity. The chief source of wisdom comes not from talking with others, not from personal experience, but from books. Read and learn. Read and be wise.
5. Studying both prose and poetry teaches us about words and how they are used, writing style, tone (ironic, sarcastic, sincere, disinterested), persona, form, meter, the structure of arguments, syntax, rhetorical devices (like anaphora, metabasis, polysyndeton), the varieties of sentence structure, vocabulary, and so much more.

The grand secret of writing well is this: While courses in composition have value and can be helpful for cleaning up student essay styles, clear, effective, powerful writing comes mostly from reading good writing and imitating it, whether the imitation is conscious or unconscious. If you study models and imitate them, you will quickly improve your prose. Read a lot, write a lot, write well.

1. Reading, thinking about, and discussing literature is one of the best, most fun ways to learn how to think and to present and defend ideas. Reading attentively and writing out your interpretations teaches you how to draw conclusions and support them with reasons (and references to the text you are interpreting). Believe it or not, reading, interpreting, and presenting conclusions about various documents, presentations, and proposals is a major task throughout the careers of most educated people. Those who learn how to think analytically will drive in the fast lane.
2. By reading literature, you will encounter images, symbols, and uses of figurative language (like metaphor, simile, personification) that present and connect ideas in new and suggestive ways. What a powerful, enjoyable, thought-provoking experience it is to read the unusual expressions of both poets and novelists. You can enrich your own writing and thinking by encountering these associations. (One student, upon reading Hamlet’s threat, “I will speak daggers to her,” created the alternative, “I will speak flowers to her.”)

So, instruction? If you want to develop critically important job skills—the ability to read, write, and think—study literature.

4. Unification.Reading literature allows you to see life whole, to unify and apply all knowledge. Whereas the various disciplines focus on their own discrete vision of life and reality, literature includes all of them in an integrated, unified whole. Literary works combine history, philosophy, psychology, art, ethics, sociology, political science, theology, and sometimes science and logic (have you read any detective stories recently?). While the other subject areas build walls to separate themselves, literature loves linkages and unifications. Literature includes everything because life includes everything and literature is about life.
5. The fusion of thought and feeling. The other disciplines in school, together with many of the activities of living, involve a single-minded focus on intellectual concerns. Literature, on the other hand, allows the reader to experience the interaction among the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of life. Only after such experience can we understand, for example, Pascal’s comment that “the heart has reasons that the reason knows nothing about.” We talk about mind and heart as separate parts of our being, but these are just metaphors. The truth is that thinking and feeling, agreeing and empathizing, analyzing and intuiting are all interconnected. Literature reflects this fact of human nature better than, say, a “completely objective” report of a crime or accident. A document that gives “just the facts, ma’am” is an incomplete account.
6. Freedom to explore the hypothetical.A very large gift offered to humanity by literature is that it allows us to reach beyond reality into the deepest realms of possibility—and impossibility. Stories take us beyond the limits of time and space and of what is (and even what can be), and they enable us to explore our imaginations without restraint.

History recounts what was. Science describes what is. Ethics states what should be. But literature—while it certainly can include history, science, and ethics—can create what never was and what cannot be. It can describe imaginary worlds, rewrite the past, invent the future—or a hundred or a thousand of each.
It has been said that fiction is the highest form of truth because it is not chained to events the way history is. A literary work can explore a historical event by positing a better or a worse outcome, by inverting the winner and the loser of a conflict, by rearranging allies and foes, or by inventing beings from another planet who serve as foils to the follies of the human race. All of this taking liberties with reality serves to stimulate our thinking in new ways, along new pathways, and to the clearest, purest truth. And simply stretching the imagination feels so good.
So, if I had been the TA that day, what should I have said to the student who objected to reading Macbeth? “Macbeth really is about you. I’ll help you understand how”? or “It’s not about you? That’s why you should read it, to learn about other people and other ideas beyond your experience”? or “Come on. It’ll be fun”? or “Here, read this essay”? I hope that student eventually discovered the riches and wisdom—and enjoyment—packed into all those old books. Scowling at what used to be called the modern classics is, quite frankly, self-limiting. I hope you won’t make that mistake.
P.S. Consider this essay an argument in favor of reading DWEWs (Dead, White, European, Women), too. There is much to gain by reading Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Ann Radcliffe, and many others.
P.P.S. These books are called modern classics because the ancient classics refer to writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and so on. Those authors are also well worth reading carefully.