I read because I want to experience something from someone else’s perspective. It is really that simple. We and our senses. Those define the world for us. The nature of truth or experience is always through calibrated perceptions. The more you read, the multifaceted you become. This helps in evaluating situations from various angles. This helps to maintain a balanced outlook towards life. When we read we take in a viewpoint, a thought. We then ponder on it. Initially, it is easy to try and break anything that is an opposing school of thought, but as we mature, as we keep learning we understand the tinted shades of the same color or a spectrum of various colors. That is the beauty reading offers us.

The lexicon is constant. We have a standard set of words. Words have meanings. Those don’t change. However, our brains do. We interpret situations differently, and we document them. The words remain the same. Reading is the way of coming at the same level. Those who write and those who read use the same standardize language. It is the level plane for transfer of knowledge and ideas. It is the cross-section of psyches where one can jump across in someone else’s mind.

Although standardized, words offer enormity of cultures distilled into words. I read for the enigmatic experiences and their etymology.

Sólstafir. This single Icelandic word signifies crepuscular rays. Think about the geography, think about the naturally occurring phenomenon. A scientific fact distilled into a single word. This word, by its mere pronunciation, brings about a horde of meaning. There is a German word, fingerspitzengefüh. From the time I first read it, it has stuck in my mind. It literally translates to finger tips feeling. These words tell a long winding tale of the culture and people. I read to enjoy that. I read because I like to experience it all, like the people of the land do.

I read because I like to feel challenged. I like the intellectual masturbation which brings about the elation of thought. At times, we are complicit with our understanding of the world. Like everything which is too comfortable with itself, our thoughts grow weary and old. They need to be challenged. The traditions and rituals that our routines develop need a shakedown from time and again. I read for that jolt of an atypical. This jolt can be through a religious, political ideology, or some factual revelation that shatters the very fabric which I have assumed as my reality for as long as I can remember. I read to understand the plight of Hassan from the Kite Runner, I read to wonder about life like Oscar Wilde’s Lord Henry does. Or like Douglas Adams so brilliantly and subtly puts,

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.

From Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy

You cannot see what I see because you see what you see. You cannot know what I know because you know what you know. What I see and what I know cannot be added to what you see and what you know because they are not of the same kind. Neither can it replace what you see and what you know, because that would be to replace you yourself

These ideas are complex. They need thinking, they need digestion, comprehension. It took me a day to process the last quote. I read because I like this processing. I like to be challenged.

Everyone has 24 hours in their day. People spend those in learning, experimenting with all their senses. Not everyone can experience everything. That is when books come to rescue. As I mentioned before, it is very effective way of knowledge transfer. The medium waits for you. It offers you knowledge at your own pace. A school going kid can take years to read and comprehend a brief history of time and an astrophysicist might run through it in a month. Reading is your self-paced experience. Many authors, after going through the life experiences of ages, distill their learnings in small jewels of knowledge. I wonder at the time it would take me to come up with a thought like this,

“A civilization decays much more from inner failure than from an external attack. It may fail because in a sense it has worked itself out and has nothing more to offer in a changing world, or because the people who represent it deteriorate in quality and can no longer support the burden worthily. It may be that the social culture is such that it becomes a bar to advance beyond a certain point, and further advance can only take place after that bar has been removed or some essential qualitative variation in that culture has been introduced.”
- Discovery of India — Jawaharlal Nehru.

I also read for companionship. I read for trust. It is selfish I know. The strongest and the most predictable bond I share is with books. The characters come to life around me. Even after meticulous descriptions of people or situations, the world that rises up is my own, built by the fragments of the text and figments of my imagination. The white space filled with the references of my world. I create a cozy castle of experience where I reign supreme. As I open the pages of the book, I create marvels which are marvelous only for me. I let myself go in the bottomless abyss of creation, I float in the endlessness of that limbo, quite content and comfortable in the company of my faithful words.

I read because then I can be many, and I become many. After that experience, this reality we unfortunately cram ourselves in, feels terribly limiting in its scope and bland in its execution.