Reading With Understanding, Of This

Maybe we should be reading with understanding of this simple truth:

Reading might be less like a transformation and more like an introspection.

Maybe this is like the cliche that people say about money: It does not change you, it reveals who you are.

It sounds like a bit of both if you ask me.

You can learn from books, obviously, but it matters too who is doing the reading.

So nothing about reading, or listening to Mozart sonatas, or viewing paintings by Raphael necessarily transforms or even improves someone’s character. As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, “A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

-Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures Of Reading In An Age Of Distraction

Originally published at Sterling Terrell.