Why I read

I have spent a lifetime reading in all the disciplines, including fiction, in an attempt to find out why we human beings behave the way we do; why, when we all purport to want happiness and peace on earth, we choose to embark on courses of action that militate against any form of harmonious coexistence with each other and the planet.

No one, it would appear has found the answer yet, but in the process of searching for answers I have had a lifetime of wondrous dialogue with the great minds of history, past and present, who have recorded their observations, experiences, ideas, discoveries, thoughts, insights, hopes and dreams in literature, drama, poetry and every subject Dewey has so elegantly classified to simplify the search for us.

And then, the saving grace of serendipity that reading brings; those perfect and beautiful words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs that refine an idea, opening the heart and the mind to resonate with joy at the sheer splendour of the entire complicated and mysterious system we call life.

I was 15 years old when we learned about the horrors of the Great Wars and I discovered the tragedy of man’s inhumanity to man. I was inconsolable. At the same time, however, I happened to read Wordworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” and felt mankind redeemed as the world exploded into profound meanings far beyond these aberrations. These extracts still have the power to move me beyond the insane to the numinous.

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; -
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of spendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

The innocent brightness of a new-born day
Is lovely yet;
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race has been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

And THAT is why I read.