People often have the impression that I am a very well-read person. For the longest time, however, that wasn’t necessarily the case. Well, that would depend on what we mean by “well-read.” As journalism has been one of my passions for many years, going all the way back to high school. Reading news stories is something I have always done. However, when I was asked to read a particular book for a school assignment, for example, I often saw it as more of a chore than an opportunity to really understand the story or the deeper ideas behind it.
The medium that has always attracted me more has been video and audio. If one were to measure the collective hours I have spent watching YouTube video essays and listening to podcasts, the number would probably be immense. And because these forms of media are relatively modern, many of the voices I have spent the most time listening to have themselves been modern.
Over the last two years, however, I have made a conscious effort to return to reading and to learn more about the literature of the past. The motivation ultimately came while I was listening to a podcast in which the importance of reading came up. One idea that stuck with me was that good literature is often literature that exists in conversation with what came before it. This also reminded me of something I repeatedly heard a lot during my Master’s research from my supervisor: on the importance of “standing on the shoulders of the giants that came before us.”
The more I thought about it, the more I realised how true this is beyond academia and literature. So much of the world we experience is shaped by ideas and philosophies from the past, often in ways we don’t consciously recognise. The ideas we hold dear did not simply appear out of nowhere. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we are constantly drawing upon, responding to and reinterpreting the ideas of people who came before us. Julia Kristeva’s concept of “intertextuality” captures: the idea that texts do not exist in isolation, but are connected to other texts through quotations, references, allusions and reinterpretations.
I have found this particularly fascinating when engaging with politics and philosophy. I had always noticed how frequently references were made to Enlightenment thinkers and philosophers from antiquity. But what became more interesting to me was discovering that when you read people like Nietzsche, Plato and others, you find that their works are themselves often in conversation with the thinkers who came before them.
There are also terms that have become commonplace in political and cultural discussion, such as “Orwellian” and “Kafkaesque.” I had heard these words countless times without always making the connection to the literary works and ideas that gave them meaning. Reading the works themselves made me realise just how much cultural shorthand we use without necessarily understanding where it comes from.
For the longest time, I had a rather strange impression that fiction was not something to take particularly seriously. Looking back, I am not entirely sure where that idea came from. I simply tended to prefer more direct forms of communicating ideas. If someone had something important to say, why not just say it? I struggled to see the value of allegory and fictional narratives when compared with a straightforward discussion of the subject.
My experiences over the past two years have radically changed that perspective. I now realise that I had significantly underestimated just how much can be communicated through fiction. A fictional story can explore an idea without simply explaining it. It can allow you to inhabit a particular perspective, confront a moral dilemma or experience a world shaped by assumptions very different from your own. And because fiction is often open to interpretation, the same work can mean very different things to different people depending on their circumstances and experiences.
There is also something almost surreal about reading a literary work and allowing your own mind to construct the world being described. When reading a novel, you are not simply being shown a setting or a character. You are participating in the creation of the image in your mind. In some respects, this can produce an experience that film or television cannot quite replicate.
It has become a bit of a cliché to say but the more I have thought about all of this, the more unfortunate it seems that reading appears to be in decline. Over the past two years, I feel that engaging more seriously with literature has contributed enormously to my own growth metally, and I think many more people could benefit from doing the same.
