#196: Shared Thoughts, the Value of Bad Literature & Truer Truths

3 Ideas in 2 Minutes on the Thrill of Reading

I. Shared Thoughts

Seeing things through the eyes of others and reflecting their most inner thoughts back to them is a powerful method of persuasion. Good literature is no different.

The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

—Alan Bennett

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II. The Value of Bad Literature

It may be tempting to chase those moments. Although, according to English philosopher G.K. Chesterton, there’s also something to be learned from bad literature.

In one sense, at any rate, it is more valuable to read bad literature than good literature. Good literature may tell us the mind of one man; but bad literature may tell us the mind of many men. A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. It does much more than that, it tells us the truth about its readers; and, oddly enough, it tells us this all the more the more cynical and immoral be the motive of its manufacture.

The more dishonest a book is as a book the more honest it is as a public document. A sincere novel exhibits the simplicity of one particular man; an insincere novel exhibits the simplicity of mankind. […] Thus a man, like many men of real culture in our day, might learn from good literature nothing except the power to appreciate good literature. But from bad literature he might learn to govern empires and look over the map of mankind.

―G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

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III. Truer Truths

So what makes a good book? They convey truths truer than reality.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

—Ernest Hemingway

🐘

Have a great week,

Chris
themindcollection.com