Why Read Stories?
Okay, I’m going to start a post on why you should read with an admonition to watch something, rather than reading. Which just goes to show that life is, indeed, interconnected!
So please take seven minutes and listen to this “crash course” on literature. I promise you won’t regret it!
And then come back to me… I’d like to talk in particular about one of stories’ functions: to arouse empathy. Because the more I’m hearing the news and talking with people (particularly, as I write this, my friend Kyre in Ukraine) and watching the world, the more I’m wondering how many problems could be solved if we had—and exercised—more empathy.
How can you develop empathy? Read stories! Stories—whether fiction or nonfiction—invite you into someone else’s life. They allow you to feel pain and sorrow, joy and transformation; to love deeply and hate just as deeply; to achieve and to fail. But, importantly, they do not make any of those feelings or situations about you: they create a reality in which you are part of the characters’ lives, emotions, and cares.
Read enough, and you won’t look at other people the same, not ever again.
In an age of polarization, when The Other has mysteriously been transformed into The Enemy, we need all the empathy we can get. I’ll take a page here from my own experience doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. When I experienced anxiety, reacting emotionally to something someone said or did by panicking or assuming the worst, my therapist used to challenge me to stop and ask myself if my explanation was the only reasonable one (hint: it never was). Then why not look at other possible explanations before flying off the handle?
It applies here as well. If we assume we understand what others say or do or mean or feel, we’re taking over the story, which might in fact be theirs to tell. But if you’re a reader, you have experience withholding judgment, waiting to see where the character is coming from. You have empathy.
Damon Young has written about our age being one in which far too many people are living with an “empathy void.” I’m sure he wasn’t talking about readers
I’m sure he wasn’t talking about you.