Why read?

Reading must often feel a useless indulgence. Unless you are part of the society of authors and scholars, you will rarely have the satisfaction and improved understanding that come from dissecting a work in conversation. Nor does reading bring any significant amount of praise or even recognition, since with so few now reading, you will meet hardly anyone who knows how Rasselas differs from Tuesdays with Morrie, or that one book even can differ in any meaningful way from another. Nearly all think of reading as nothing but a hobby, increasingly rare and in its more serious form simply eccentric. Worse, what little recognition there is for reading belongs to those who read, or at least flatter with the pretense of reading, the latest profitless works of trendy literature or radical politics. When someone says he is a reader, hide your own reading or risk having to fight your way out of the conversation when he starts to praise some House of Sand and Fog or Hegemony or Survival. It is even more depressing when the reader turns out to read only books on personal finances (men) or self-help (women); they look on books as mere stuff to line their material lives, not readers but paper wasps.

As it happens, reading good books is of private advantage; it is difficult to prove to doubters why this should be, but once acquired a well-stocked mind reconciles a man to life. By contrast, Theodore Dalrymple described the self-destroying pain of those who reach their 30s without internal resource, just as the delusory significance of youth fades. Still I would like to believe that these strange electrical whorls, that for the moment fill my mind but soon enough will uncoil and go dark, have some kind of purpose outside myself. Johnson's essay in the Adventurer, issue 85, gives no proofs, but offers wonderful reassurance.

An opinion has of late been, I know not how, propagated among us, that libraries are filled only with useless lumber; that men of parts stand in need of no assistance; and that to spend life in poring upon books, is only to imbibe prejudices, to obstruct and embarrass the powers of nature, to cultivate memory at the expense of judgment, and to bury reason under a chaos of indigested learning.

Astounding that at the very dawn of the modern age, Rousseau's foolishness had already spread generally. Johnson might as well be responding to a modern pedagogical statement on the value of critical thinking over "rote learning." His next argument has by now been made often, but it is delightful to hear how he says it:

If reason has the power ascribed to it by its advocates, if so much is to be discovered by attention and meditation, it is hard to believe, that so many millions, equally participating of the bounties of nature with ourselves, have been for ages upon ages meditating in vain: if the wits of the present time expect the regard of posterity, which will then inherit the reason which is now thought superior to instruction, surely they may allow themselves to be instructed by the reason of former generations. When, therefore, an author declares, that he has been able to learn nothing from the writings of his predecessors, and such a declaration has been lately made, nothing but a degree of arrogance unpardonable in the greatest human understanding, can hinder him from perceiving that he is raising prejudices against his own performance; for with what hopes of success can he attempt that in which greater abilities have hitherto miscarried? or with what peculiar force does he suppose himself invigorated, that difficulties hitherto invincible should give way before him?

Johnson comes now to the part that, even if I can see how the sentence I italicized is only assertion, still warms me with reassurance:

Of those whom Providence has qualified to make any additions to human knowledge, the number is extremely small; and what can be added by each single mind, even of this superior class, is very little: the greatest part of mankind must owe all their knowledge, and all must owe far the larger part of it, to the information of others. To understand the works of celebrated authors, to comprehend their systems, and retain their reasonings, is a task more than equal to common intellects; and he is by no means to be accounted useless or idle, who has stored his mind with acquired knowledge, and can detail it occasionally to others who have less leisure or weaker abilities.

I wonder though, what Johnson would say to those of us whose minds fall between the discoverers of new knowledge and the common intellects, in an age when the common intellects are little interested in new knowledge and wholly uninterested in anything old. To live in an age of ignorance has the selfish advantage of making even modest minds seem great, to themselves, for merely attempting what was once required of young students. It is not a very satisfying feeling though.

If I have dwelt on the unhappiness of having no public benefit in reading, still Johnson goes on to say much the same thing:

Persius has justly observed, that knowledge is nothing to him who is not known by others to possess it [Scire tuum nihil est, nisi te scire hoc sciat alter: your knowledge is nothing, unless another knows of your knowledge.]: to the scholar himself it is nothing with respect either to honor or advantage, for the world cannot reward those qualities which are concealed from it; with respect to others it is nothing, because it affords no help to ignorance or errour.

He goes on to recommend that scholars cultivate skill in conversation, to make their knowledge of public use and honor, and to practice writing, so that their scholarship and their conversation are both made more exact. What, though, would Johnson say is to be done, when there is not conversation to be had, nor many readers to be found for writing?

To write a blog, praise myself, and take another swig from the bitter cup of learning, I expect.