Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom
fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We
realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of
goodness and good sense, but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be
suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a
self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those
of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will
see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I
regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face
things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I perceive the
olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a
dog. Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of
individuality. In reading great
literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in
the Greek poem, I see with a myriad of 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.
C.S. Lewis
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