A L A I N . D E . B O T T O N
Why do we read?
People who love books are often assumed to belong to a single category. Last
week, a pink leaflet comes through the letterbox. It is from a dating agency
which, in a well-meaning (unsolicited) attempt to find me a partner, requests
that I fill out a questionnaire. I am asked whether, on weekends, I prefer playing
sport, gardening, cooking, watching television or reading. A utopian premise
lies behind this subtle inquiry - the premise that two people who love books
will stand a good chance of liking one another.
However charming the idea, it fails to pick up on the extraordinary diversity
of reasons why people read, and hence on the dangers of conflict arising between
two people who are otherwise both attached to spending weekends quietly between
hard covers.
One might make a most basic distinction between motives for reading: on the one hand, reading to escape oneself, on the other, reading to find oneself. The former is particularly well addressed at station news-stands. Marooned in anxious or tedious circumstances, there is pleasure in buying a paperback before a journey, in involving ourselves in a story of ten generations in a Southern American town or in the quest to find the murderer of a CIA agent decapitated in an internet cafe. Once we've boarded a carriage, we can abstract ourselves from current surroundings and enter a more agreeable, or at least agreeably different world, breaking off occasionally to take in the passing scenery, while holding open our badly printed volume at the point where a detective has let off a gun, or a farmhand has kissed the heroine - until our destination is announced, the brakes let out their reluctant squeals, and we emerge once more into reality, symbolised by the station and its group of loitering slate-grey pigeons pecking shiftily at abandoned confectionery.
Then there is the pleasure of reading to find oneself. There are authors who
seem to express our very own thoughts, but with a clarity and psychological
accuracy we could not match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What
was shy and confused within us, is unapologetically and cogently phrased in
them, our pencil-lines in the margins of these books indicating where we have
found a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of
which our own minds are made, a congruence all the more striking if the work
was written by someone in an age of top-hats or togas. We feel grateful to these
strangers for reminding us of who we are.
There may be an analogy to be made between love and reading. A few years ago,
I was browsing in a bookshop when my eye was caught by a quote on the cover
of a paperback: "To be psychologically alive means either being in love,
or in psychoanalysis, or in the spell of literature." The book was called
Tales of Love, it was written by the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, and
I was tempted enough to buy it. Unfortunately, the analyst let me down badly,
for in over three hundred pages, she did nothing to elaborate on the fascinating
sentence that her publisher had so cunningly placed on the back cover.
Still, the thought seemed valuable and stayed with me: of an important connection
between love and reading, of a comparable pleasure offered by both. A feeling
of connection may be at the root of it. There are books which speak to us, no
less intensely - but more reliably - than our lovers. They prevent the morose
suspicion that we do not fully belong to the human species, that we lie beyond
comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena
may be conveyed on a page in a way that affords us with a sense self-recognition.
The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone
in feeling, and for a few moments, we are like two lovers on an early dinner
date thrilled to discover how much they share (and so unable to do more than
graze at the food in front of them), we may place the book down for a second
and stare at its spine with a wry smile, as if to say, "How lucky I ran
into you."
Marcel Proust seems to have been saying something similar when, towards the
end of his long book, he wrote, "In reality, each reader reads only what
is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which
the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover what he would
not have found but for the aid of the book." The value of great books isn't
limited to the depiction of emotions and people akin to those in our own life,
it stretches to an ability to describe these far better than we would have been
able, to put a finger on perceptions that we both recognise as our own, but
could not have formulated on our own.
If we are able to relate our experiences to those described in great books
written long ago, it is perhaps because there are fewer human types than there
are people. Arthur Schopenhauer suggested that every great writer was able to
bring out the universal dimension of local phenomena. Hamlet is one character
in a play set at the Danish court, and yet there were, Schopenhauer pointed
out, several Hamlets living unhappily and moodily in Frankfurt in the middle
of the nineteenth century, as there must be Hamlets in London at the end of
the twentieth. The genius of Shakespeare was to thread together disparate characteristics
and so define a permanent human possibility. Mario Vargas Llosa remarked that,
growing up in Peru, he had known many Emma Bovarys.
It may explain why literature can offer relief when love has failed. When I first read Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, I was at university, twenty one and, of course, Werther. Lotte was Claire (she lived along the corridor, studied biology and had shoulder-length chestnut hair in a centre parting) and Albert was played by Robin, an economist who she'd been seeing for three years - testimony, if one needs it, of the ability of novels to mould themselves around, and illuminate, our own lives.
Recognising ourselves in works of art enables us adopt a consoling perspective
on our own troubles, for we can learn to view events from the universal standpoint
which writers have themselves taken in order to create their work. Schopenhauer,
who had met and much admired Goethe, believed that after reading a great love
story like Werther, a man who had suffered a romantic rejection would see that
he had experienced a universal kind of pain, not a personal, isolated curse.
"Such a reader will look less at his own individual lot than at the lot
of mankind as a whole, and accordingly will conduct himself as a knower rather
than as a sufferer."
The idea that we are not alone in the world can be cosy. Nevertheless, we may still be attached to feeling unique, and this is not something literature suggests we in fact are. Take the following: "Some people would never have fallen in love if they had not heard there was such a thing." I recall reading this maxim from La Rochefoucauld on a flight between London and Edinburgh. "That's my idea," was my immediate response, and I stared out of the window at the cottony Midlands in some confusion. "He's stolen my thought." But it seemed unlikely given that he was born in the spring of 1613 and I in 1969, so more generously, I reflected, "Maybe I've stolen it from him" - equally impossible, given that I had until then never laid eyes on the Maxims.
It suggested an answer at once humbling and ennobling: that both La Rochefoucauld
and I had lived in the same world, and could hence at times be expected to think
roughly the same thoughts, even though he was a genius and I am not (La Rochefoucauld
would immediately have picked up on the self-pity in this last comment, and
could well have squashed it with a withering: "There are few people more
convinced of their own genius than those who complain of how stupid they are.")
It is an idea that threatens our sense of identity, which is based so much on
difference. What if exposure to literature reveals too much of what we have
in common with others? What can we say - and write - if all of our most private
experiences turn out to be the well-trodden thinking grounds of other writers?
Part of learning to read - and by implication to write - is accepting that our
personalities are not as water-tight as we like to imagine, that many things
which we think of as private are in fact not very personal - this is not to
say they are impersonal, a word invoking the service in fast-food restaurants,
rather that they are common to all human beings. The price of discovering that
we are not so isolated is a recognition that we are also far from unique.
Alain de Botton is the author of How Proust can change your Life (Picador,
£5.99)