"If the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such excuse is needed. It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure--mysterious, unknown, useless as it is--is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading."
--Virginia Woolf, "How Should One Read a Book?"After spending an entire week reading essays on reading, reviewing, and criticizing by Virginia Woolf and her father and uncle, the essay I quoted above was by far my favorite. And I found quite quickly that I greatly preferred Woolf's essays to those of her male relatives (this should come as no surprise when I reveal that her uncle believed Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to be the apex of all novels). Woolf's love of reading is reflected quite strongly through her essays, and she's a big proponent of reading for pleasure, and not feeling that all one's reading must be restricted to the classics. As the five overflowing bookcases in my apartment (along with the heap of loans I'm incurring to earn my graduate degree in literary studies) will attest, reading is something of an addiction for me. And I wholeheartedly agree with Woolf in believing that reading will make us better, more empathetic, more loving, and more enlightened human beings. I certainly hope so, but the decline of reading in our current culture makes me fear for the worst.
(And I also wonder whether Orwell read this last bit before writing Animal Farm. Ah well, somethings are meant to be pondered and never known.)
