The Reader’s Quest. How literature helps us find meaning and understand the world.

I'm working on a new book

A few weeks ago I was awarded a second Emergent Ventures grant to write a book about reading great literature. I don’t know when or how this book will be published, but I do know that I want to share my early thoughts about it here first. This is something like what I expect the introduction to say. Some of you will have seen my note a few weeks ago, this goes into the idea much more deeply. I look forward to your thoughts…

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The decline of serious reading.

Don’t die without reading Anna Karenina. It’s not worth it.

You can take Anna Karenina and swap it for any number of titles or authors. Jane Eyre. Hamlet. The Divine Comedy. Proust. Austen. Milton. Wordsworth. Flaubert. Chaucer. Douglass. Woolf. Pessoa. Ovid. Whitman. Dickinson. 

But the point is the same.

These, and many others, are the best works of literature in Western culture. The best works of the imagination. They are some of the peak experiences available to you, akin to visiting global heritage sites, eating exceptional food, or listening to intensely great music. There are many peak experiences available to us in the world and the best literary works of the imagination are among them.

From the Arthurian Romances to The Lord of the Rings, from the Odyssey to The Crying of Lot 49, from Dante to Dickens, these books are a repository of wisdom, an enticement to the imagination, and a stimulus for new perspectives.

We read literature for many reasons: to see ourselves; to see people and parts of life we had never imagined; to be subtly persuaded to new ideas; to become mind readers of people from other times and places; to escape our life, and thus to see it more clearly, as in a distant mirror.

We read for pleasure, comfort, knowledge, distraction, wisdom, learning, fun; we read for pretentious reasons, snobbish reasons, because we are bored, because we are compelled by a plot, because we have become addicted to books, because we have discovered that nothing else stimulates the imagination in quite the way that great literature can.

Only increasingly, we don’t read great literature.

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No-one here reads old books

When I spoke to a range of people in Silicon Valley recently, everyone gave the same answer. A few people here read old books. One or two of them even read Shakespeare and Tolstoy. But it’s rare. Instead, the intellectual landscape of Silicon Valley is political, with some philosophy. The majority of tech people have a modern, STEM-based view of the world; they are much less influenced, if at all, by any notion of the literary canon.

When lists of the “vague tech canon” were proposed recently there were many excellent books involved, but no Shakespeare, no Dante. In one of the richest, best-educated, most productive areas of the world, among some of the most intellectually curious and energetic people alive today, they’re reading Sapiens or Seeing Like a State, but not great literature.

And it’s not just tech people. The world is full of well-educated professionals who don’t read imaginative literature. 

Entries in Who’s Who in the UK have seen a decline in people listing highbrow interests like literature and a rise in “ordinary” interests like seeing friends or watching television. Likewise, professionals reporting highbrow tastes have dropped, and only half of British adults say they read books for pleasure. (It’s similar in the USA and Europe, where numbers range but always show significant proportions of adults not reading books at all.)

So many of the people I know who work in consulting, finance, and law tell me they haven’t read any classic literature since they were at school. In the book club I run on Substack, I hear from people who are reading Shakespeare in their sixties (and loving it) who also haven’t touched it since they were at school. 

Indeed, I know teachers who don’t read the great works. So common is it for middle-aged people to read Harry Potter that I know well-paid lawyers who read that and little else.

We are no longer appreciating the classics like we used to. 

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A hunger to be more serious

But I got another answer to my questions. A few of the most significant people in Silicon Valley do read the classics. And plenty of others know they should. More of them are starting to do so. I haven’t read Tolstoy but know that I need to, or words to that effect, sum up a rising mood. When I spoke to Tyler Cowen last year he told me the same thing.

Maybe what we think of as a crisis of culture, a decline of civilization, the end of reading, is actually an opportunity to bring a new generation of people to appreciate great literature. Maybe we reached the bottom and people are ready to come back to great books.

When I published a Substack piece about this, my emails and WhatsApp were all saying the same thing. People want this. It reminded me of a line from a Philip Larkin poem: “someone will forever be surprising/ A hunger in himself to be more serious.”

Too often, the people who want to take are seriously are met with a literary culture more interested in status than books. And potential readers of literature are occupying their imaginations with other things.

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We live under a philistine supremacy.

Today, too much effort is spent on literary discussions that are not about reading literature. As the critic Christian Lorentzen said recently, the literati is increasingly more interested in “the economy of prestige” than in literature.

A professor of English Literature has argued that Taylor Swift is the equal—the equal!—of Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. Periodicals like The Atlantic publish articles making long and involved comparisons of the HBO series Succession with Shakespeare’s King Lear whilst making no aesthetic consideration. Major literary critics spend their time on Twitter mocking J.K Rowling, pretending that she misunderstood Lolita and therefore failed some sort of “moral test” (you surely do not need telling that reading a novel is not a moral test). The Times publishes articles about whether or not you should date someone who reads the Beat writers (a group of American authors from the post-war period, like Allen Ginsberg). 

The point is that you can spend your time worrying about whether people who read On the Road are datable or you can read On the Road. You can spend your time reading about whether Shakespeare was a woman in the Atlantic (no, he was not) or you can read Shakespeare.

You get one life. Use it to read the best books! If The Reader’s Quest does its job, you’ll keep putting it down to go rushing to the originals.

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Invaded by glory

The psychologist Paul Bloom has pointed out that the imagination preoccupies our time. More than any other occupation of leisure, we imagine. We watch and read, we dream and doodle, we listen and wonder. We spend far more hours every day engaged with fiction that we do with sex or food or sports or music or anything else. But we mostly use that time watching, not reading. 

Among educated professionals today, Netflix and HBO have taken over from the novel as the main form of cultural capital. Time use surveys show people spend hours watching television and minutes reading books. And then there’s your phone…

Television isn’t evil. Nor is social media. It isn’t rotting your brain or giving you square eyes. I watch television. Great novelists watch television. (I scroll too…) But the balance can be restored. Watching often means missing out on reading. We are, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “distracted from distraction by distraction.” 

In the same way that we would all know that it is a good thing to travel—to see the great mountains of the Alps or the great temples of Japan—we know that it is a good thing to read the great works of the Western Canon. In the same way that you can experience a sense of wonder from swimming in a beautiful lake, hearing live music, or visiting a strange new landscape, so you can, in the words of Professor Helen Gardner, be invaded by a sudden sense of glory when you read great books.

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Why we should read classic literature.

What potential readers want to know is: what do I get out of reading Austen and Dickinson that I don’t get from reading something else? The sudden sense of glory is surely available in many places…

One answer is that I can’t tell you. You have to find out for yourself. These books were written by some of the smartest, most insightful people ever to live. What they offer is irreducible. That’s why they are the best. There is no adequate summary of Dante or Ovid. Authors like this take you way beyond anything you have already experienced. It’s like travelling. You have to do it to know why you wanted to do it. You won’t know how surprising it is until you get there. 

This book is therefore a call to you—yes, you—that reading literature is important, exciting, mind-expanding, and that you should do more of it. But not for the reasons people often give you. Reading the classics will not save democracy. It probably won’t morally improve you, provide you with critical thinking skills, increase your empathy, or preserve a tradition of values. (Though it might be part of any of those things…) 

No. We should read these great works because they offer us pleasures and perspectives that are unavailable anywhere else. Because they can fundamentally change how we think and feel about ourselves and the world around us. Because they are pinnacles of human accomplishment.

You don’t really need anyone to tell you that it’s worthwhile to read Shakespeare and Milton and Austen. This is a matter of common sense. 

Darwin read Milton on the Beagle. Nelson Mandela read Shakespeare in prison. Nikola Tesla could recite long passages of Goethe’s Faust. Horatio Nelson quoted Henry V in his letters. When George III went mad, performances of King Lear were banned. In the trenches of the First World War Harold Macmillan read the Iliad. And the list goes on. This is powerful stuff.

You don’t need anyone to tell you that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Eliot (T.S.) are the core poets of English, or that Austen, Dickens, Eliot (George), James, Woolf, and Tolkien are the core novelists. You don’t need anyone to tell you that reading Jane Eyre is life changing or that reciting Emily Dickinson is profound.

You don’t need to be persuaded that great literature is great. Any more than you need persuading that simply to see the Alps or to visit the Sistine Chapel is a singular moment in any life. No more do you need to be argued into the idea that travelling to see the world is beneficial or that sampling different cuisines is life-enhancing. 

Do we ask the point of knowing what Einstein thought? Do we make a great puzzle of why Mozart is played in so many adverts or why Vermeer stops everyone in their tracks? Do we need to be reasoned into reading our way through hundreds of pages about behavioural economics or the history of early humans? Do we wonder whether seeing a work of Michelangelo is worth it? Would you doubt the value of visiting Japanese temples? 

The world is full of great human accomplishment — and some of the best of it is available cheaply and easily in books. In the midst of complacency we are surrounded by neglected wisdom.

As Ezra Pound said, “A man who has climbed the Matterhorn may prefer Derbyshire to Switzerland, but he won’t think the Peak is the highest mountain in Europe.”

Think of this as your call to adventure. The quest is worth doing, but the hero never knows why until they go on the journey…

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Literature and the Quest for Meaning.

So why did Darwin read Milton and Tesla read Goethe? Many will say it’s all a question of taste. That you don’t have to read these authors. I say these works are part of how we make sense of the world.

Our lives are a quest for meaning. We are always travelling to find out who we are, undertaking career journeys, and going in search of our lost and future selves. We go on expeditions and gap years; we get outside of our comfort zones; we venture into new areas of personal growth; we overcome our demons; we battle the gatekeepers; we look inside for our true strength; we wander from employer to employer to learn about ourselves, develop our virtues, overcome our faults, and find the rewards of meaning, recognition, and gold. 

Again and again, we find the idea of the quest expressed in modern times—the idea of searching for meaning, success, happiness, experience, security, enlightenment, a sense of ourselves, of who we might become. The quest was perhaps the central image of the twentieth century, for better and for worse. The Wright Brothers and Henry Ford. Neil Armstrong on perhaps the most significant quest any human has ever undertaken. Mass migrations. Mass exodus. Travelling for work in the Great Depression. Commuter angst in the 1950s. 

Those images remain central to our world today. The intergalactic quest remains an obsession of the peregrine human imagination. The flow of mass migrations remains tragic and hopeful; so many lives are remade every year. In the twentieth century we had travelling salesmen and itinerant preachers who pitched themselves in fields and squares; now we have global corporate careers for the professional class and self-help gurus who traverse the world giving hotel-conference-suite seminars. Even modern technology is deeply associated with a personal quest: that of Steve Jobs travelling to India to study meditation.

We are odyssean, restless. 

And what area of study has paid more attention to the quest than literature? From Homer’s Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses, from the Aeneid to Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, from  Dante to Mrs Dalloway, from mediaeval romances to Helen deWitt—so much of the greatest literature is about quests. (Indeed, if we expand our horizons a little, we can draw the same comparison from Chaucer to the Cohen Brothers, from gallant knights to Jedi knights, from the Arthurian quest for the Holy Grail to the quests of Indiana Jones.)

“Of all fictions,” said the critic Northrop Frye, “the marvellous journey is the one formula that is never exhausted.”

It is no coincidence that the most popular work of literature written since the Second World War, the one that continues to sell in large numbers, to dominate the imaginations of children and adults, to be one of the most successful film adaptations of all time, is The Lord of the Rings, one of the greatest, grandest quest stories since ancient or mediaeval times. 

And many of the stories from the last two centuries that have lodged themselves most firmly in the public imagination—Bartleby the Scrivener, Waiting for Godot, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty—are anti-quests, in which the hero refuses the call to adventure. It is a very resonant part of modern life that we tell stories of those incapable of the quest, or unwilling.

Every journey begins with a single step, we say, and we remain obsessed with stories of journeys where that step is never taken.

The reason why the quest is so central to our lives is simple: questing is how we find meaning. In an admiring essay about The Lord of the Rings, the poet W.H. Auden wrote, “to go in quest means to look for something of which one has, as yet, no experience… man is a history making creature for whom the future is always open… human “nature” is a nature continually in quest of itself.” 

Human nature is a nature continually in quest of itself. Your life is an imaginative quest. Don’t neglect the great works of the imagination as you search for meaning.

The limits of your imagination are the limits of your world. Nothing expands the limits of your imagination better than great literature. Great literature surprises and delights, and through these surprises it has the power of producing a new perspective, a new understanding of reality.  As the philosopher Richard Rorty said (following the poet Percy Shelley), imagination sets the bounds of thought: imagination breaks the path that reason follows.

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The Common Reader and literary appreciation.

There used to be such a thing as a common reader. There still is, in fact. We just don’t talk about it very much. It’s an old idea, but newly relevant. Common readers are autodidacts: they read great literature, and books of all descriptions, under their own guidance, to their own schedule, and for their own reasons. They want to see Shakespeare—and Austen, Dante, Milton, Woolf, Tolkien—for themselves, the way people travel to see the great places of the world. 

It’s that simple. At least, the idea, the aim is that simple. Doing it, being it—finding your way through the Western Canon isn’t as simple; Hamlet or War & Peace defy simplicity. Reading is like anything else. You can learn to do it better. You can improve your reading by improving what you read.

Many people believe, or like to say, that analysing a book, like they did at school, kills the pleasure of reading. This is either an error or an excuse. Knowing more about football—the teams, transfers, tables, and tactics; the statistics and odds and how each possible outcome will affect the overall rankings—does not diminish the pleasure of watching a game. Quite the opposite. Learning how to play the guitar (and thus knowing more about what you are listening to) doesn’t kill the buzz of listening to music, nor does analysing the real meaning of lyrics in internet discussion groups. Learning to speak a language doesn’t make it less interesting to travel abroad. 

Knowledge is a form of appreciation. The more you understand about a book, the more you can appreciate it. (That’s why The Reader’s Quest will also encourage a catholic approach to reading. Read widely! Read the best! Read realism and read dragons! Read Agatha Christie and Jane Austen!)

This is an idiosyncratic primer, for appreciating literature. It is written for people who want to see great books for themselves. It is for those who are, or aspire, to be common readers, which is one of the great cultural traditions of our civilization. Like literary critics, the reader is self-authorised.¹ They read for their own purposes, under their own impetus. 

What I offer is the companionship of one self-authorised common reader to another.

The Reader’s Quest will be an introduction to English Literature, one of the great accomplishments of civilization. It will give you a core reading list (many of the names already mentioned, plus a few more) and a series of ideas for understanding those authors. It will show you what to read and how.

There is an idea now that literature departments in universities have all gone woke or have been corrupted by literary theory. There’s some truth to that, but it’s far from the whole truth. A great amount of very interesting work has been done.

Did you know that Charles Darwin was hugely influenced by Charles Dickens, and that we can see that influence on every page of The Origin of Species? Or that Jane Austen’s novels are embedded with the moral philosophy of Adam Smith? Or that the theory of human imitation that predominates in Silicon Valley was first developed by analysing Proust and other authors? (There is a whole theory of Shakespeare based on that idea...)

So, even if you don’t want to read Emma and watch Twelfth Night, you might be surprised at what you can learn from literature. 

Many wonders await us if we choose literature. In less than three decades, many of the ideas in behavioural economics have failed to replicate. The great revolution became more of a niche revision. All the while, the work of novelists like Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Marcel Proust—whose works are full of psychological insights about the way our emotions dominate our intellects, the power of habit in our lives, and the unseen actions of “cognitive bias” in our decisions—sails proudly into a second, or third, century of unassailed accomplishment.

We read for pleasure first and then to see the world, and then for all the strange new ways books make us see reality.

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View quakes of human sympathy

If you had to name a book or author that represented a decade, you might pick The Great Gatsby for the 1920s, Agatha Christie for the 1930s, The Invisible Man for the 1950s, and so on. In previous ages, it would have been Melville and Stowe in the 1850s, Dickens and the 1840s, Austen and the Regency, Wordsworth and the 1790s, Goethe and the 1770s, Johnson and the 1750s, and so on.

Today we would pick authors like Malcolm Gladwell and Daniel Kahneman. A boom of psychology research became a pile of bestsellers that explain what makes us tick and how society really works. Behavioural economists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman attained a high cultural status. Books like Guns, Germs, and Steel became the symbols of the culture.

Whereas once every common reader knew Elegy in a Country Churchyard and King Lear, now they have all read The Tipping Point and Thinking Fast and Slow. Where once we all knew Dickens’ characters (they were printed on cigarette cards fifty years after his death) now we know about loss aversion and availability bias.

Literature is the other half of life. We are obsessed with rational thinking, analysis, data, and statistics. We forgot what John Stuart Mill said, along with many others, that it is poetry and logic together that make the true philosophy. This theme can be found again and again in literature. It’s there in Chaucer and Shakespeare and Swift. It’s an essential part of the endless struggle to understand the world and ourselves. 

Literature does this through view quakes.

A view quake, defined by the economist Robin Hanson, is an insight that dramatically changes your worldview. You might get a view quake reading about behavioural example, when you realise just how much of ourselves we inherit and is beyond our control. For many people, Kahneman was a view quake. Learning about evolution and market economics, or the history of slavery and the slave trade can be view quakes, fundamentally changing the way you see the world.

Some of our strongest view quakes come from fiction, from story, rather than from data.

When we want to make persuasive arguments, we don’t rely on charts and statistics alone: we tell stories. A new study in the The Quarterly Journal of Economics reinforces the basic message of Kahneman and Tversky, showing that people remember stories more than they remember statistics: “the average impact of statistics on beliefs fades by 73% over the course of a day, but the impact of a story fades by only 32%.” 

Intellectually, our society is big on statistics, and short on stories. We live by anecdotes and journalism, not the large pictures of life only a great artist can give, as George Eliot described literature when she made this exact same point in 1856. As she said, literature changes our minds by amplifying our experience.

The journalist James Marriott told me that before he read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, he had been told what it was like to be a teenage girl—i.e. constantly in receipt of invasive and unwanted sexual attention—but it was only after reading the novels that he had any sense of what that really meant. The way he would describe his knowledge might not change after he read the books, but his understanding of what it meant was completely different.  

… plenty of things that I've been told about what it was like to be an adolescent girl, the unexpected and intrusive sexual attention of men, the awkwardness, the uncomfortableness, the sexism, I've been told all this and I knew it, but there's something qualitatively different about the experience that a novel gives you of making you feel it… I sort of felt like I understood those things emotionally by reading that book. Although everything I'm telling you about what I know about being an adolescent girl before reading that book and after reading that book would sound exactly the same when I summarize it, I think novels can give you this emotional understanding of life.

Even though he knew the same things before and after reading those novels, he did not know them in the same way. The Neapolitan Quartet was a view quake of the way he felt about the world, his capacity to imagine the world from other perspectives. 

Literature gives us those moments, described by Philip Larkin in The Whitsun Weddings, when we “see it all again in different terms.”

Many view quakes, of course, can be hugely negative. The conversion of many people to Marxism in the twentieth century was the root of much death, suffering, and evil. The prevalence of perverse ideology in our times hardly needs explicating. We live among restrictive, repressive, and angry ideas. 

What the art historian Kenneth Clark said at the end of his television series Civilisation in 1969 feels more and more pertinent in our overly ideological, polarised culture: “Human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.” 

The sort of view quakes you get from literature are not a question of whether one should or should not be a liberal or a Marxist. Instead, they are rooted in human sympathy as well as in ideas. Reading gets us out of our own minds, our own perspectives. 

As the former professor of Literature, John Carey, said, “Reading releases you from the limits of yourself. Reading is freedom.”

This is why literature has often played such a major role in social change. During the abolition debates in the USA for example, it was Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the memoirs of former slaves like Frederick Douglass that captured the imagination most strongly. It was by having people imaginatively feel what slavery was like that abolition made its case.

Literature, as Professor Hollis Robbins told me, makes us into mind readers.

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Poetry and logic together

Logic and emotion, knowledge and intuition, rationality and wisdom are at work upon us in the world. We are every day amidst the clash of reason and unreason.

Psychologists have shown that we tell ourselves we have rational reasons for what our brains have already decided by instinct. We have named our cognitive biases but they often remain beyond our control. We know we are irrational at stem and core, but we still seek more and more rational means of knowing ourselves.

In literature we experience the sweeping perspectives of logic and emotion, knowledge and intuition, reason and unreason, rationality and wisdom. Literature is where these forces are united, integrated, juxtaposed, and synthesised.

It is in literature that we find both the wise man and the fool not always as distinct and opposing forces—, they are now ironic mirrors of each other, now a grotesque blend, now a unified state of sanity, now a diptych urging sincerity, now a heedless warning said twice in different words.  Imaginative literature is where the forces of reason and unreason are united, integrated, juxtaposed, synthesised. 

Literature incorporates all of this in the perpetual quest for wisdom, the search for meaning, the desire not to have beliefs, opinions, and ideologies about the world but just the wish to see it, to hold it all together, however briefly. 

Literature lets us imagine ourselves as both the wise man and the fool—something no other art can give us.

You cannot fit a human life into a theory. We are living, discordant, bundled creatures, full of wonder, boredom, and other conflicting feelings and serious desires. We can only be got at piecingly, deedily, narrowly. We are doctrinally incoherent. So many of the components of our minds can be categorised, classed, scaled, and named; so much of ourselves can be mapped, networked, charted, and displayed; but no map ever made a sailor’s feet wet and no theology ever incarnated a god. 

We will never understand ourselves as a thinking, feeling species, as humanity, without the broad encompassment of art, and especially the literary art of finding words for that is vague and beguiling and mysterious in our lives.

We know the world through our imagination: the rest is just uncoordinated data.

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The struggle of thought.

This is a book about the lifelong quest to read great books and to learn from them, to experience the best that has been thought and said. Reading literature can provide you with a perspective on the world that you cannot get any other way. Literature is a part of the quest to see, experience, and understand life that cannot be replicated, summarised, or replaced.  

The Reader’s Quest will introduce you to ideas about how influence works in poetry, why literature is Darwinian, not Newtonian, why interpretation isn’t always very useful when reading literature. It will show you how moral revelation can come from the marvellous journeys of Arthurian knights and from the ordinary quests of Austen’s heroines—and how both can be profound.  It will show you the marriage of poetry and logic in Chaucer’s polyphonic wisdom, Shakespeare’s imitations, Jonathan Swift’s reasonable madness, and John Stuart Mill’s poetry criticism. We’ll see how epic poetry after Milton and Wordsworth transfigured into new genres of history and science writing—including Darwin’s Miltonically grand new vision of the universe. And we’ll see how the real revolution in twentieth century literature wasn’t just modernism, but Tolkien’s reimagining of mediaeval quests. 

To paraphrase George Eliot, literature is not a teacher but a companion in the struggle of thought. This book is a companion in that struggle, a companion to the reader’s quest for meaning.

1.   I heard this phrase used by Merve Emre, who was paraphrasing John Guillroy. It occurs in Professing Criticism.