Oblique Truths

 As someone who does not read as much as I once did, atleast in quality, I found this Aeon essay on the value of reading thought provoking. The debate over what reading is actually for has been running for over a century. John Ruskin argued that literature makes us better people, we are sharper, more capable of genuine thought. Marcel Proust disagreed. 

For Proust, reading isn't moral instruction; it's something more personal and harder to name. To him it was a way of making contact with your own deepest experience, of keeping the past alive, of expanding what you're capable of feeling. Neither was entirely wrong, but the argument between them turns out to be the fault line that runs through every conversation about books that has followed.

That argument is very much alive today. Conservatives praise the great books canon for instilling good values; progressives critique it for who it leaves out. Both sides, the essay's author Flora Champys argues, are making the same mistake because they are treating literature as processed food for thought, telling readers in advance what they're supposed to take away. The stronger tradition, running from Rousseau through Madame de Staël, understood literature differently: not as moral nutrition but as a form of freedom, a way of keeping language supple and resistant to the prefabricated narratives that power always tries to sell us.

In a media environment designed to harvest attention and narrow interpretation, literature's particular strength is its obliqueness. It can be the much needed empowerment we need to keep us from drowning in and losing ourseleves in media, because the it approaches truth sideways, through complexity

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