Thank you, Sophie. I love that phrase—the inner joy to reflect. I believe novels are less about escaping life and more about returning to it with greater attention.
Thank you, Amrita. I'll happily take "an ode to novels and writers." 😊 I hope it was also an ode to all the dead writers who continue teaching us how to be alive.
Great article, thankyou! I feel like a lot of this disconnect between what is valued in school vs. what is valued beyond school, literature being a fantastic example, is because of good teachers. Good teachers know that literature is important, so while there's nothing they can do about the capitalistic society outside of school that cares only for contributing to the economy (which literature supposedly does not do), they will at least do all they can to instill some kind of interest in it during school.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I think you're absolutely right. Looking back, it was often individual teachers, not institutions, that made the difference. They treated literature as something alive rather than simply another subject to be tested.
Perhaps one of the most important things a good teacher can do is help students discover that books are not just schoolwork, but companions they can return to long after school is over.
Thank you so much. That means a lot to me, especially because the essay began with a memory from my own literature class. If it encourages even a few students to see literature as something more than an academic exercise, I would consider it a success.
Thank you, Michael. That's a dangerous question 😊 If I had to choose only ten, I would probably cheat immediately and say all of George Orwell and all of Leo Tolstoy.
But if we're talking individual books, my list would certainly include:
"we spend twelve years convincing children that literature matters and the rest of our lives acting as if it doesn’t.
We tell students that novels are important. We design entire educational systems around them. We write essays about them, analyze them, and test children on them."
I would argue that this entire system is what convinces people that literature DOESN'T matter.
What did school teach you that you actually need to know?
- How to read
- How to write
- Basic math
Everything else either wasn't taught at all, was taught badly, or was taught to people who would never need it. Why would anyone who learned about literature in such a system come to any conclusion other than "literature is just more bullshit they wasted my time with"?
I didn't just not like school. I hated it for all the same reasons as you disliked it. Among others.
I have heard — in life and in films — so many experts in Ancient Greek and Latin say it: “the technology may have changed, the norms and values may have changed, but the feelings, desires and worries are all the same. Homer, Epicurus, Caesar: the desire of young men to get status and belong to the group, the desire of women to take care of their close ones and be independent, the worries of old age about being a burden, the jealousy, shame, and the temptation to lie or even steal: none of these dramas have changed, because humans have not changed.”
What Harari calls “biological dramas” are even shared with other mammals: the preferred child of the father, the rivals who fight to be the one to mate, the terror of contamination, etc.
Older men with beards reviewed their lives in hindsight and wrote. Centuries pruned the corpus, sparing those resonating the most, and what got lucky enough not to burn.
Like you write: this preserves wisdom, knowledge about ourselves and ways of talking and thinking. Not all of it is true, but it makes us resonate as humans. Like make-up is a supernormal stimulus for our face-hungry minds.
If you are interested in language and cognition, you may be delighted to dive into those two hypotheses about the mind: Sapir-Whorf — language shapes perception (e.g color names on color perception). The reverse is fascinating too: verbal overshadowing — when talking about one’s experience disrupts and destroys it.
Last words: Tolstoy knew we could do telepathy with our close ones. He wrote about it in Anna Karenina, because he experienced it himself. You can read more on it in my publication — I hope you like Star Wars :-)
A public defender is an attorney that's assigned to you when you can't afford one on your own. Mine turned to me and said "Rule 1. Never dress better than your attorney." I took it as a compliment.
> At some point, we collectively decided that literature belongs to childhood.
You've built this entire article distancing yourself from we; I don't know who we is anymore. Is it us? I'll read it again.
Thank you for highlighting this and remind us of the inner joy to reflect on our life purpose through reading novels
Thank you, Sophie. I love that phrase—the inner joy to reflect. I believe novels are less about escaping life and more about returning to it with greater attention.
Truly a heart warming ode to novel and writers! Atleast this is what it felt like!
Thank you, Amrita. I'll happily take "an ode to novels and writers." 😊 I hope it was also an ode to all the dead writers who continue teaching us how to be alive.
Yes, it truly an ode to the immortal gone writers! I'm happy you wrote so fondly about them! 🤗😊
Yes to all of this!
Great article, thankyou! I feel like a lot of this disconnect between what is valued in school vs. what is valued beyond school, literature being a fantastic example, is because of good teachers. Good teachers know that literature is important, so while there's nothing they can do about the capitalistic society outside of school that cares only for contributing to the economy (which literature supposedly does not do), they will at least do all they can to instill some kind of interest in it during school.
The good ones, anyway.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I think you're absolutely right. Looking back, it was often individual teachers, not institutions, that made the difference. They treated literature as something alive rather than simply another subject to be tested.
Perhaps one of the most important things a good teacher can do is help students discover that books are not just schoolwork, but companions they can return to long after school is over.
Some astute observations! I think this would make wonderful prefatory reading for introducing students to the study of literature!
Thank you so much. That means a lot to me, especially because the essay began with a memory from my own literature class. If it encourages even a few students to see literature as something more than an academic exercise, I would consider it a success.
Thought provoking. I'm glad I found yout substack. If you could only have 10 books, what would you pick?
Thank you, Michael. That's a dangerous question 😊 If I had to choose only ten, I would probably cheat immediately and say all of George Orwell and all of Leo Tolstoy.
But if we're talking individual books, my list would certainly include:
Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov
Faust — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Middlemarch — George Eliot
1984 — George Orwell
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame — Victor Hugo
Very well written and I agree.
One point though.
"we spend twelve years convincing children that literature matters and the rest of our lives acting as if it doesn’t.
We tell students that novels are important. We design entire educational systems around them. We write essays about them, analyze them, and test children on them."
I would argue that this entire system is what convinces people that literature DOESN'T matter.
What did school teach you that you actually need to know?
- How to read
- How to write
- Basic math
Everything else either wasn't taught at all, was taught badly, or was taught to people who would never need it. Why would anyone who learned about literature in such a system come to any conclusion other than "literature is just more bullshit they wasted my time with"?
I didn't just not like school. I hated it for all the same reasons as you disliked it. Among others.
It reads like a meditation article.
I have heard — in life and in films — so many experts in Ancient Greek and Latin say it: “the technology may have changed, the norms and values may have changed, but the feelings, desires and worries are all the same. Homer, Epicurus, Caesar: the desire of young men to get status and belong to the group, the desire of women to take care of their close ones and be independent, the worries of old age about being a burden, the jealousy, shame, and the temptation to lie or even steal: none of these dramas have changed, because humans have not changed.”
What Harari calls “biological dramas” are even shared with other mammals: the preferred child of the father, the rivals who fight to be the one to mate, the terror of contamination, etc.
Older men with beards reviewed their lives in hindsight and wrote. Centuries pruned the corpus, sparing those resonating the most, and what got lucky enough not to burn.
Like you write: this preserves wisdom, knowledge about ourselves and ways of talking and thinking. Not all of it is true, but it makes us resonate as humans. Like make-up is a supernormal stimulus for our face-hungry minds.
If you are interested in language and cognition, you may be delighted to dive into those two hypotheses about the mind: Sapir-Whorf — language shapes perception (e.g color names on color perception). The reverse is fascinating too: verbal overshadowing — when talking about one’s experience disrupts and destroys it.
Last words: Tolstoy knew we could do telepathy with our close ones. He wrote about it in Anna Karenina, because he experienced it himself. You can read more on it in my publication — I hope you like Star Wars :-)
Cheers, Mikael
> “You’re the nation’s treasure.”
A public defender is an attorney that's assigned to you when you can't afford one on your own. Mine turned to me and said "Rule 1. Never dress better than your attorney." I took it as a compliment.
> At some point, we collectively decided that literature belongs to childhood.
You've built this entire article distancing yourself from we; I don't know who we is anymore. Is it us? I'll read it again.