This is the sort of question I have my own answer to & an idea of what you might say, but I'm interested in actually hearing it from you -- why is reading important to you?
I’ve been thinking a lot about Scheherazade lately and how poorly she has been understood. It’s always said she told stories to save her life but that’s not true; she told them to save everyone else’s.
2.
Is reading the thing I find important? I’m not so sure it is. I think the thing is stories. Peter Pan is my favorite story, but not my favorite book. I can’t remember ever not knowing it or remember which versions I read and where they were from, and it doesn’t matter much to me. It feels as essential and natural as a creation myth to me. Like a math problem whose logic is inherent.
3.
Jean Rhys said that when she was a child she thought that God was a big book.
4.
Genesis 11:1-9
Once we built a tower taller than god. Genesis is Old Testament, so this is a jealous, vengeful god, and to punish us for building it, he knocked it down and invented all the languages. When we understand each other too well, we threaten god.
5.
“Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.” - Nabokov, “Good Readers and Good Writers”
6.
Thinking about asking why reading is important makes me think about things bigger than reading. Foundational stuff like the invention of language and what makes humanity different than existence.
7.
“Because it’s there.” - George Mallory
8.
Who told the first lie? It’s kind of a contentious question. Was it God, when he told Adam he would die if he ate from the tree of knowledge? Was it Adam, when he misquoted God to Eve? Was it Eve, when she repeated what Adam said to the Devil? Was it the Devil, to Eve? Was it Adam again, when he threw Eve under the bus? Who brought all the trouble into the world? Why is knowledge inseparable from shame, in this story?
9.
The oldest story ever told is about a man who doesn’t want to die.
10.
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.“ - Wittgenstein
11.
Solipsism isn’t true in theory but it is in practice. I read to realize I’m not alone. I read to love the world better. I read because everything in the world is exactly the same and in this cold universe, it’s comforting to have an identical thought as someone 4,000 years before me.
