Does Reading Do Us Any Good?

Does reading turn us into better people? Does it make us more sensitive and empathetic? Does it improve our judgment? And if it is not edifying, then what good does it do? About 120 years ago, the indecisive, dilettante offspring of a wealthy physician found these questions so important that he took up his pen to argue that, no, books are never the instruments of moral betterment. He based his argument on his own memories. Though he had always been an avid reader, books, he claimed, never gave him any sort of useful, respectable instruction. That does not mean they were meaningless – far from it; they shaped his apprehension of life by preserving indelible impressions of his surroundings. Relatives now long gone, places he hadn’t seen in years – these were nevertheless still present in his mind through memories of his readings. Books helped keep past sensations alive. Literature made time tangible: something to be grasped without being abolished.