The Risk of Reading
From Mark Edmundson's essay in the NY Times Magazine of August 1, 2004:
Reading is indeed nearly boundless in its promise. It can effect changes for the greatest good. But it is worth bearing in mind that reading's promise is tied up with some danger, too.
To me, the best way to think about reading is as life's grand second chance. All of us grow up once: we pass through a process of socialization. We learn about right and wrong and good and bad from our parents, then from our teachers or religious guides. Gradually, we are instilled with the common sense that conservative writers like Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson thought of as a great collective work. To them, common sense is infused with all that has been learned over time through trial and error, human frustration, sorrow and joy. In fact, a well-socialized being is something like a work of art.
Yet for many people, the process of socialization doesn't quite work. The values they acquire from all the well-meaning authorities don't fit them. And it is these people who often become obsessed readers. They don't read for information, and they don't read for beautiful escape. No, they read to remake themselves. They read to be socialized again, not into the ways of their city or village this time but into another world with different values. Such people want to revise, or even to displace, the influence their parents have had on them. They want to adopt values they perceive to be higher or perhaps just better suited to their natures.
...
Words are potent. Ten years after the fact, people often can't remember a grievous pain: ''Was it the right leg or the left that I broke?'' But a decade on, they'll remember every word and tonal twist of a painful insult. (Robert Frost once suggested that poems should have the force and intensity of rich insults.)
There is no doubt that the force of reading, the power of words, is not always a force for good. The abominable Marquis de Sade influenced many consequential writers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Often, you can only imagine, he made what was cruel in their hearts yet crueler.
Mr. Edmundson is also the author of "On the Uses of a Liberal Education," Harper's Magazine (Sept. 1997).