Literature is calling you to put down your phone.
Go on the quest of your life.
Literature is calling you to put down your phone; ignore the culture wars; block out the secondhand musings of newspaper philosophers. Turn to the great works of civilisation. See that your life is a quest for meaning. Become as ambitious as the poets whose work outlived empires.
Rome, Greece, and Renaissance Italy have fallen, while Homer, Virgil, and Dante are declaimed. These three quests are the foundation of the Western literature. All literature is quest; all life is quest; all quest is self-discovery, aspiration, virtue riding in the wilderness.
Imagination breaks the path that reason follows: great poets continue to break new paths for human flourishing. From Sir Launcelot to Bunyan's Pilgrim to Lizzie Bennet, great heroes are great questers; they break new paths as surely as John Wayne and Neil Armstrong.
Literature's great quests have inspired the world to change: Adam Smith's favourite book was Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels; Horatio Nelson quoted Shakespeare in his letters; when Tesla was struck with inspiration for the induction motor he was reciting Goethe.
In the trenches of the First World War, the future Prime Minister Harold MacMillan read the Iliad; to write the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson had to read Milton; before he could reimagine the universe, Darwin had to read Paradise Lost obsessively on the Beagle.
We are all in the gutter, as Oscar Wilde said, but some of us are looking at the stars. Literature directs our gaze upwards.
Good! Now turn this into a book!
I’ve just come out of Mrs Warren’s Profession at the Garrick, which I booked last minute on your recommendation. It was indeed really excellent - minus the ghosts and their accompanying ghost music which were as subtle as the proverbial ton of bricks. I think you said that when you saw it they even showed up partway through Mrs W’s big speech. They didn’t today - Staunton was uninterrupted start to finish, and was excellent. It’s the best theatre I’ve seen in London for some time.