HOW TO READ

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26777, 21 May 1948, Page 9

HOW TO READ

PROFESSOR’S ADVICE “ FOR PLEASURE ONLY ” EFFECT ON CHARACTER Special to the Daily Times LONDON, May 1. Professor J. Isaacs, talking about reading for pleasure in the 8.8.C.’s Overseas Service, said: “ The golden rule about books is always read for pleasure only. Not the pleasure of mere, self-indulgence, but the pleasure which is profit. It is true that we read when we are tired and want to relax, but then we read a different kind of book—or should do so. After reading a real book you should feel—not relaxed, but tired, and at the very best you should feel shattered. "That is how you feel after reading Dostoevsky’s ‘ Brothers Karamazov,’ or Emily Bronte’s ‘ Wuthering Heights,’ or Melville’s ‘ Moby Dick,’ ” continued the professor. “ That is when you feel shattered. You are never quite the same person again. The book becomes part of your own biography. Such a profound experience comes, perhaps, only a dozen times in your life, and if it comes after the formative period of youth, you renew yourself, you regain a lost youth, with all its capacity for intense feeling. “ Because literature uses words which have been familiar to us from birth, and which we use every minute of the day, we get the arrogant notion that we can understand it without any preparation or special training. Why should every other activity in life need training and not the most subtle activity of all—the appreciation of literature? Words, when they merely give information, or when they appear one by one in a dictionary, are easy to cope with—but when they are grouped, together, and so disposed and manipulated as to call up emotion, or create beauty, they need a special equipment. That equipment is known as literary taste. “To get the most out of literature you must feel fit; it puts you on top of your form, it helps you to feel alive. And when you have a special reason for being alive, your appreciation of literature is most intense and most sensitive. That is why young people in love see further into the poetry of John Donne or the passionate tragedies of Shakespeare than at any other time. Just as you run faster when you are terrified, so you feel more deeply when you are in love. . “We read for many kinds of pleasure. We read to meet other people, explore other worlds, to get our share of the pool of experience stored up by the great minds and personalities of the world at their most vital and in their most profound moments. Reading is a vast stock-taking, which occurs in youth on the threshold of experience, and in maturity when a new equipment of life, leads to new standards by which the truth can be measured. , , “And another thing, what you take in you can give out again, modified by your own experience and personality. As Dr Johnson said: ‘They who do not read can have nothing to think and little to say.’ Let us come back for a moment to the question of training. The actual details of approach depend on the particular form of literature being tackled—the novel, or drama, or poetry, or whatever it may be. The essential thing is for the reader to co-operate with the author. Give a book at least the same attention you would give a film or a detective story. . , “ The great writers are not frightening,” concluded Professor Isaacs, “ they do not intimidate you. Hazlitt and Defoe and Laurence Sterne are very human and disarming. They share in ordinary human experience—they understand human frailty and if, like Sterne, they pull your leg occasionally—so much the better, because even if literature is ultimately a serious business, it is not always a solemn affair. Literature is not a private possession. Everyone shares it. ‘ Reading maketh the full man,’ said Francis Bacon. It makes a rich man, a wise man, a sensitive man, an alert and quick man. It makes a man of the world.”