I’m glad I went to college and majored in English.
But Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) may have been right when he told some students that “education is not good for writers.” You can lose touch with the emotion, joy, and ease that comes with writing simply “for fun.” Now your work is being graded. It is being flicked through in workshops and shrugged off. It is being criticized for missing the human form. It is being drawn into an academic vortex, always searching for the writer’s secret and hidden motivations, and the ideology the author might allude to in his prose.
There are many opinions about the advantages and “benefits” of the MFA program, for example, when it comes to getting an education in writing. But what can often happen with novelists in particular, and this has happened to me, is that they forget that novels and stories… drum roll please… are there to enjoyed.
There are many others who have expressed this better than I have, chief among them the polymath C.S. Lewis (of course, who else?), who chided those adults who might become too sophisticated or “educated” to properly enjoy the fairy tales they loved so much as seven-year-olds. But it seems worth revisiting, especially in a literary climate that seems overly animated by political statements, or in which literature is read primarily for the elusive underlying theme that can tell us something profound about the world and ourselves in it.
Fiction has become easy propaganda, and besides, it is not read that much anymore anyway. Perhaps it can be said that books are now designed for talking. to on sites like BookTok or Bookstagram, but not enjoyed as a transportable experience. People still read, but not as much as they used to; or we read by scrolling, which is often a crazy mix of visual, aural, and semantic content. Simply reading silently alone under a 25-watt lightbulb is almost extinct in the 21st century. This is how novelist David Foster Wallace explained why even some of his “smart friends” are uncomfortable reading, because it requires sitting alone in a silent room.
The British philosopher Roger Scruton, who died in 2020, believed that in the modern Western world we had replaced joy with pleasure, beauty with dopamine, love with lust.
I feel it in my bones: I’d rather check my emails again than patiently enjoy the curry chicken on my plate. I try to rush through interactions with other people so I can stay up to date on Twitter. I waste even more time on YouTube instead of picking up a pencil and writing a letter to my German pen pal.
Lewis himself seemed to suggest that the problem of modern humanity was not an excess of pleasure, but our failure to truly enjoy anything at all. In Instructions for a sub-devil, Uncle Screwtape scolds his nephew for allowing his human “patient” two real pleasures. One of the pleasures was “reading a book that he really enjoyed.”
There are few things better than escaping the dopamine rush and the academy of correct and learned opinions and simply enjoying a good book. That’s not to say we shouldn’t talk about books or explore their deeper meaning. Quite the opposite! But we should enjoy the story first before we go back to our phones to leave comments on Booktok or Goodreads.
