439. Not Just Books

Reading a book exposes us to the experiences of another person. Sometimes we are given these experiences directly, as when we read a memoir or an autobiography. More often, we receive them indirectly, through the content and form of the book, which are shaped by the knowledge and intuitions the author has developed throughout their life.

Not only do we gain new knowledge as we read, we also add to our awareness. Our awareness expands through the experience of reading what the author has created through their own awareness. Such an experience is enormously valuable, for the experiences we can have directly in our own lives will always be a tiny subset of the total experience of humanity. By compressing experience into the medium of language, a book allows us to experience much more than we otherwise could.

We might then conclude that we can fully understand life by reading widely and that the awareness we gain from books is sufficient to living well. But while the awareness gained by reading is valuable, it does not follow that it replaces the awareness developed through other kinds of experience. It is easy to fall into the habit of elevating the ideas and concepts we find in books above the actual experience of life. We can become attached to beliefs about narratives and theories, and limit our attention to investigating literature and language, instead of unleashing it to explore the world around us.

Any such attachment is an impediment to the further growth of our awareness, as it prevents us from noticing what lies outside our books. Instead of seeing life as an intractably vast mystery, we narrowly interpret it through the lens of particular stories or theories. We might even come to believe that our understanding is complete, and that we need nothing more from life than what we have already discovered in books. While we must read what feels important to us, we must not turn reading into an obsession that keeps us from investigating the limitless reality that exists beyond language.