Thoughts on Literature

Literature enlarges our being by admitting us to experiences not our own. They may be beautiful, terrible, awe-inspiring, exhilarating, pathetic, comic or merely piquant. Literature gives the entree to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realise the enormous extension of our being that we owe to authors. We realise it best when we
talk to an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. My own eyes are not enough for me. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or bee.

In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in a Greek poem, I see with a thousand eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.



Quote taken from: "An Experiment in Criticism"
Author C. S. Lewis
Pages 140-141
Cambridge University Press, 1961