My Life on Literature

Originally published on June 7th, 2024

Reading literature transformed me.

It morphed my inner landscape from crumbling pizza shack into cavernous palace.

When we’re young, our inner self is endless. Imaginative, unbothered, still echoing with the afterglow of creation.

But it shrivels as we grow up. Especially today. We're cut off from the source. Someone born in 1790 instead of 1990 spent nearly every waking moment in nature, often alone, beholding its beauty. Compared to past centuries, we spend 0.001% as much time in nature.

Back then, images didn’t exist. Zero photographs. Zero videos. Outside of expensive paintings, there was nothing to display the world “out there”. Instead, you received the world firsthand as raw, unfiltered reality. This direct contact deepened your connection with nature, and also with your vast inner landscape. Marveling the outer revealed the unique wilderness teeming within.

That’s no longer true.

Most people today live secondhand lives (myself included). Gobs and gobs of precious attention given to the world “out there” – newsfeeds, foreign wars, fantasy football, or the latest fit of some celeb’s fourth kid. It becomes harder to distinguish the secondhand from what’s Real. Soon we forget there’s even a difference.

Meanwhile, the complex individual beneath dwindles and atrophies. One’s infinite potential for 1-of-1 variety replaced by the triple-stuffed comfort of scrolling and blanging arcade thrills.

The words we use each day reflect what’s within. The Michelin-star possibilities of language have been mostly reduced to kid-menu fist-pounding of ketchup and chicken strips.

An externalized world leaves us with evacuated interiors. So how do we remember the richness within? For some it might be marathons, music, or making indie films. But for me it’s language. Reading the greatest words ever written. Literature.

Your mind, once expanded by face-melting prose and bittersweet twists of fictional fates, can never return to its original dimensions. You’re permanently altered, an ever-growing chamber of palatial proportions. These ink-based architects have taught me so much:

Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, that childhood is an endless fount of self-knowledge. What naturally grabbed my attention when young? How can I better align to this true self?

The Razor’s Edge, that the life of the mind can be primary, which can be the right choice (plus the vanity of chasing status, and the terrific humbling force of death)

Niels Lynhe (that gem, over and over), to honor my creative impulses, to guard them as I get older and the pressure to be practical rises, and to grapple well with the harsh stakes of existence.

The Age of Innocence, that the fundamental emotion of life is bittersweet.

The Moon and Sixpence, on the intensity of divine inspiration, and the tradeoffs of chasing a creative dream at all costs.

On the Road, that I have a greater capacity for enthusiasm than most, and this is a gift.

Middlemarch, that sentences so stirring could even be written, and that minds in past centuries also spun full-on galaxies (yes, the 1830s actually happened, those people actually lived, it’s so easy to forget)

The Myth of Sisyphus, that we must live life maximally, to the point of tears; remain on that dizzying crest, fueled by the unresolved central tension at the heart of our condition

And, of course, none greater than Emerson, my trusted mentor across time, that the power in me is new in Nature, and no one but me knows what I can do until I have tried.

This sampling of authors has enlarged my inner life into dimensions that would stun my past self. These wordsmiths lived life firsthand. You feel it in their prose. The greatest books from the 19th century are categorically different from those written today. Yes, it’s all black and white marks. But the great ones tapped into a deeper source, a hidden magma which gives their words geologic force. Drawing upon it has produced my own volcanic explosion of selfhood, reflected not just in words, but in my life choices.

Don’t believe me? Pick one up and see for yourself. And careful not to burn your hands.