BitterSweetLife

If the Great Reader designation could be acquired in a workmanlike way, say through a regimen of weekly lessons, like tennis, everything would be easier. Or, equally clear-cut, if it was simply a question of reading the Right Books (as many suppose), then all interested parties could work their way down the list and become pleasurably snobbish, conceivably by their 21st birthdays if they applied themselves.

Unfortunately, both practiced reading-smarts and hard-won snobbery are barred from the competition.

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It is all too easy to let the environment color what I read, like a color photo curling and yellowing in a corrosive atmosphere.

I had this thought as I sat in our dingy church kitchen yesterday morning with the gospel of Luke open in front of me.

If my surroundings seep into this book and the paint starts peeling in Galilee, the party’s over before it started. Churchianity must never enter Jerusalem.

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Of course, any discoloration, any book-corruption that took place, would be going on in my mind. The object of my reading would not actually change. In fact, great literature has been proven, over the centuries, to be able to transcend virtually any environment in which it finds itself. The classics are like that. Read them on a grassy hill, read them in a cavernous dungeon, read them with a flashlight under the covers—they still get you.

The question is, How can I subdue myself to the reality of the story I read, and fall under its spell—rather than stuffing my own passing concerns inside the binding? How might the life inside the book seep out, a kind of miraculously-preserved elixir? Clearly, the power for life-conveyance must already be inherent to what I read. Otherwise, my biased mind and mundane environment will get the better of the written page.

There can be no great readers without great books.

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This still leaves the question of how to be a Great Reader. But the problem is now simplified, because a Great Book has the innate power to make a hero out of anyone who enters it. What is required of the explorer?

Modesty. Sympathy. The heart of a learner and the mind of an interested friend. Otherwise, I find myself standing over the book, lecturing it, ridiculing its conventions and language when they seem strange, taunting its values when they contradict mine.

Great Readers cannot merely dissect—certainly not at first. They come to the masterpiece with the knowledge that they may be challenged or changed—and they allow the book to have its say. Call it intellectual modesty; the book, by virtue of having been written, of having lived for decades (perhaps centuries) and proven itself able to maintain its integrity in the faces of friend and critic alike—deserves a hearing.

Only after such a hearing can I consider myself a Great Reader. Only after a sympathetic journey through the thoughts of the author am I qualified to critique him.