Henry David Thoreau on The Vital Importance of Reading

Henry David Thoreau’s book, Walden, is a collection of his reflections during his time in a cabin in the woods over the course of two years.

While I was flipping through it, I found an essay titled Reading. Since I have been trying to read more books recently, I thought it would be an interesting chapter. Listening to what an insightful and smart individual like Thoreau had to say can never hurt.

I’d like to reflect on some of his words and see why he believes reading is so important. If you’ve ever wondered why you should read or considered it a waste of time, you can meditate on his words and understand the value of reading.

“The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.”

Heroic books like the Iliad and Odyssey will lose its true meaning and value as society moves forward. Each generation will not see the value of the older generation’s culture. The things the old revere, the new will never see eye to eye.

The valuable lessons that are taught through the strenuous and serious study of historic texts will end up being watered down or misinterpreted. With the rise of technology and the desire for quick and easy information, we are less willing to sit down with what we deem “difficult text” and study what the people before us passed onto us.

There are books that you read for leisure, and there are books that you must undertake with respect. Reading philosophy and religious books is considered “boring” because we read them in the same mindset as we read fun books. We skim through and try to look for a plot, a main character, a conflict. If there is no drama or story to follow along, we look for something else that will entertain us.

“To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.”

Do you take your books seriously? I bought books of Nietzsche and Carl Jung thinking I’d be immediately absorbed by their writings and works. As soon as I started reading the first few pages of The Will To Power and Man and His Symbols, I felt drowsy, bored and unmotivated. Soon they started gathering dust on my shelf, forgotten and bested by shallow but entertaining fictional novels.

I did not take their works seriously and will never learn what kind of knowledge they had to share if I don’t read them with intent and care. You have to take time to scrutinize ideas and dig into what the authors were trying to say and find out what they were trying to pass onto the next generations.

“Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.”

With their writings, they hoped.

They hoped that one day, someone like you would read their works, treat the ideas with respect and careful examination to understand and refine them to ultimately share them with the world, hoping to move humanity toward a better future as best as they saw.

So don’t try to approach the great works of mankind lightly. Treat them with the utmost respect. The classics and historical texts that we have been able to discover and secure are gems. We must not disregard them or we will risk repeating the mistakes of those before us.

“Most men are satisfied if they read or hear read, and perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of their lives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.”

One of the saddest things about our lives is the fact that we will never be able to read all the great books in the word, know what the great books were or are and will never be able to understand and remember them all in all their glory.

But there’s also beauty in this somber fact. There will never be an end to the books you can read. There will never be an end of the stories you will hear and the lessons you will learn. There are so many great writers to read from and so many more to come.

So why should you decide that one book is good enough? I’m not picking on the Bible or any religious texts. I’m asking you to expand your horizons. Give other books the chance.

Try them all out and see which ones suck and which ones change your life.

See which ones make you laugh and which ones make you cry.

See which books make you fall asleep and which books ignites fire into your heart and mind.

“Or shall I hear the name of Plato and never read his book? As if Plato were my townsman and I never saw him, — my next neighbor and I never heard him speak or attended to the wisdom of his words. But how actually is it? His Dialogues, which contain what was immortal in him, lie on the next shelf, and yet I never read them.”

Tell me, have you read the books that you claim to know, or have you only heard about them? Have you taken the shell of these ideas and pretend that they are your own? Before you dismiss the ideas and books that everyone likes to bash on, why don’t you see what it’s all about?

Read the works of the people who have shaped and changed humanity as a whole. If you’re a Christian, read On The Origin of Species or the Quran. If you’re an atheist, open the Bible or the Buddhist texts.

Don’t let the opinions and thoughts of others cloud your judgment or stop you from venturing into the unknown. Take in the ideas for yourself and come up with your own conclusions.

“A man, any man, will go considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise of every succeeding age have assured us of; — and yet we learn to read only as far as Easy Reading, the primers and class-books, and when we leave school, the “Little Reading,” and story books, which are for boys and beginners; and our reading, our conversation and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.”

Learning and reading should never stop outside of school. We need to take on the task of furthering and educating ourselves as individuals. We need to study the people of the past and strive to understand them.

They are revered and respected as individuals because they affected the world with their ideas through their writings and actions.

They were desperately bringing forth ideas that even they may not have understood.

They may have decided to trust humanity in deciphering the code that they never could crack, and we must accept this duty as individuals with critical importance.

The great writers and artists were simply the messengers — passing on the lessons and secrets that may guide us all towards a brighter future.