In a recently published New York Times opinion piece, Colin Robinson writes about the continued decrease in reading (of actual books, that is), denouncing a culture of instantaneous information and communication that makes focusing in on a full-length novel so very difficult. “Reading,” he writes, “always a solitary affair, is increasingly a lonely one”. As his article goes on to focus on quantifiable economic indicators of the decline in publishing, book selling, and writing, it makes a solid point; one that is, surely, very much worth discussing.

Still, in his easy categorizing of reading as “solitary” and, now, “lonely”, Mr. Robinson misses a fundamental aspect of good literature. Good literature, with its singular ability to echo the shared experiences of humanity across centuries and through diverse cultures, is a profoundly social medium. To read is to feel connected to this tradition; to realize that your individual experiences are never so uniquely isolating as you may initially anticipate.

One of the central themes in Milan Kundera’s novel The Joke is youth—its promise, and awkward inexperience. We are all familiar with the blessings of youth, embodied in profoundly empty platitudes such as “the world is your oyster”, etc, etc. Thus Kundera focuses on (one of) the challenge(s) of being young, of having such various potentials of ‘self’ available to you—ultimately the question arises: Who am I, really? And more importantly, who do I want to become?

For me the challenge of being young is facing this question in daily choices ranging from fashion (which can swing from “preppy” to “bohemian” to “who would ever wear that” all in the space of a week), to language (do I punctuate my speech with explatives? Do I rather speak properly? Or perhaps pepper my language with culturally indicative parts of speech—the ‘like’ of California girls, the ‘y’all’ of the American South?), to bigger choices of identity (am I an academic? A writer? A teacher?). Ultimately, as Annie Dillard writes, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” The identity I nurture, then, will become ever more mine: a swearing, bohemian writer, or a preppy, proper academic, or “like, a teacher, like?”, or… it seems to be a pretty big choice.

And so I, still young, flirt with my potentials, trying on this for size, that for comfort. Like Kundera’s youth I stumble awkwardly from one ‘self’ to the next, an owner of multiple sincere faces. It isn’t always easy, or always fun. It is difficult to feel grateful for “so much potential”, when this potential feels only like a quagmire of difficult decisions. And (as much as I love them all), it is almost impossible to find sympathy in my older (and wiser?) friends, mentors, or teachers, people who have found their way to an at least slightly more stable identity than I. From them I hear “it will all work out”… an empty platitude? Blind faith?

But in The Joke I can find my struggle mirrored, my emotions acknowledged—the great gift of good literature. And suddenly I feel neither so solitary nor so lonely as before…