Why Literature
Paying for a therapist when you’ve been kicked off your parents’ insurance…yikes.
Literature breathes. Because it is alive, it can prompt us to reflect on the human condition. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth we meet a man who craves power. Once attained, he discovers it brings with it a force as consequential and deadly as Aeolus’s bag of wind. Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God connects us to a woman of color set on freeing herself from the shackles of patriarchy. Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls (Antes que anochezca) lets us in on LGBT community’s resilience in the face of authoritarianism. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath leads us to consider the cost of human displacement.
Literature is more than the sum of its parts. A voice within it speaks to us. Listen and be taken to worlds of wonder. Arthur C. Clarke, for example, offers his readers extraordinary panoramas of past, present, and future in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Minds hunger for knowledge and growth. Left unfed they wither. But too often politics dilute or erase literature’s potential in the classroom. Libraries become the victims of gatekeepers. Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 focuses on a populace denied intellectual nourishment. Montag, the novel’s main character, needs to escape a world where too many go through their days feeding solely off the propaganda trough. In the end, he flees and finds refuge among society’s outcasts who lead intellectually rich lives.
To be a product of the Enlightenment and heir of ancient Greece’s tradition of democracy and open inquiry, you must give yourself into the arms language at its highest realm. It means pushing back against the sentinels of propriety to find voices old and new that speak to the most fundamental questions of human existence. To read works by voices from different races and ethnicities, different gender and sexual identities, different aesthetics and ideological perspectives opens dimensions that could otherwise stay closed. For an individual to blossom, literature must be unbound.