The Consolation of Reading

Having recently decided to return to school next year to get a degree in theology, I mentioned to a friend my nervousness at the thought of becoming a student again in my forties. She listened patiently, and then led my attention back to something I’d said earlier: I’d described how, halfway through watching Schindler’s List, I’d felt the need for background material to understand it more thoroughly; I’d been reading about German history, the psychology of good and evil, and liberation theology ever since.

“You’ll be fine,” she said. “You treat your life as if it were a graduate seminar. School will be easy in comparison.”

She’s quite likely right. I forget that most people don’t live the way I do (possibly excepting my father). I read the way most people eat—regularly, for nourishment and enjoyment, and because how else could I live?

But in fact it turns out that I am not so alone as all that. Last Saturday in a fit of Book Karma, I found myself compelled to go to a particular used bookstore in downtown Boston and I left with a 1906 book of essays called From a College Window by Arthur C. Benson, “Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge.” A century ago, he was a bit older than I am now, and had been teaching for about as long as I have.

In the third essay, “Books,” he enumerates three motives for reading: pleasurable, intellectual, and ethical (Benson 53). The first two seem self-explanatory to me, and the paragraphs about them are of interest less for their content than their lovely, old-fashioned style, e.g.: “Such a [well-read] man, if he steers clear of the contempt for indefinite views which is often the curse of men with clear and definite minds, makes the best kind of talker, stimulating and suggestive; his talk seems to open doors into gardens and corridors of the house of thought; and others, whose knowledge is fragmentary, would like to be at home, too, in that pleasant palace” (56).

His description of the third motive, however, caught my attention because it seemed to tell me something about what I do and who I am. Benson says, “and then we come to what I have called for want of a better word, the ethical motive for reading. […] I do not know why so much that is hard and painful and sad is interwoven with our life here; but I see, or seem to see, that it is meant to be so interwoven. All the best and most beautiful flowers of character and thought seem to me to spring up in the track of suffering; and what is the most sorrowful of all mysteries, the mystery of death, the ceasing to be […] becomes more solemn and awe-inspiring the nearer we advance to it” (58-60).

Now, he’s not done yet, but I note here my suspicion that few of my colleagues and none of my college students would connect the necessity for reading with the inevitability of death. Yet I can’t help thinking that Benson is onto something here. He continues, “I do not mean that we are to go and search for unhappiness; but, on the other hand, the only happiness worth seeking for is a happiness which takes all these dark things into account, looks them in the face, reads the secret of their dim eyes and set lips, dwells with them, and learns to be tranquil in their presence” (60; italics mine).

Here I recognize my search, via books, for an understanding of God and of how ordinary men and women can become killers or saviors: for a happiness that takes the darkness into account. As he says, “In this mood—and it is a mood which no thoughtful man can hope or ought to wish to escape—reading becomes less and less a searching for instructive and impressive facts, and more and more a quest after wisdom and truth and emotion” (60). To some extent this mood is a desire for restoration of a belief we may have had as children that somehow it all makes sense, a belief that books are particularly suitable to convey, as they are chaos-into-cosmos between covers.

“And thus in such a mood reading becomes a patient tracing out of human emotion, human feeling, when confronted with the sorrows, the hopes, the motives, the suffering which beckon us and threaten us on every side. One desires to know what pure and wise and high-hearted natures have made of the problem; […] one desires to share the thoughts and hopes, the dreams and visions, in the strength of which the human spirit has risen superior to suffering and death” (61-62).

And so I read. I ask questions and search through books not so much for answers as for other voices also addressing these questions. What is the nature of evil? How do we become capable of mindlessly cooperating in corrupt systems that harm others? What is the nature of goodness? How can we choose, day by day, to resist corruption, to build a sustainable, equitable future for the planet and all its inhabitants? How can I look at the vastness of the problems and still refuse to despair?

I read. Benson speaks from England a century ago, but his deep, dry voice seems to come from close by, perhaps from the chair next to mine in the library: “[T]he reading that is done in such a mood […] is a desire to feed and console the spirit” (62).


Benson, Arthur C. From a College Window. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1906.