Students often view the classic texts they read in English class as dead—the author is nothing but a bag of bones, and the language is difficult to understand. Why bother reading the book at all when a watered-down summary is a couple of clicks away? It is tempting to believe that reading classic literature has no purpose in the 21st century.
However, students may not have considered that these books are not outdated lectures, but two-way, live conversations between authors and modern-day readers.
In my high school English classroom, we had a book closet. This little windowless room was packed with a hodgepodge of shelves and housed hundreds of paperback books waiting to be lent out to students across every grade. Beowulf bumped spines with Red Badge of Courage and The Hobbit with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
I often found myself inside the closet, which smelled of sweet dust and pages, to help my aging English teacher organize the titles as they were returned from students. Hundreds of books passed through my hands on their journey back up to their high perches. Millions of words whispered beneath my fingertips, words that once flowed in a stream from the author’s mind, spilling out as ink on paper.
Books allow us to have conversations with authors around the world and across generations. We get the pleasure of hearing about sacrifice directly from Dickens. Bronte tells us in her own words how to overcome adversity.
Though libraries are meant to be the quietest of spaces, I do not think there is a place that is any louder. Billions of words rattle around the shelves, itching to present what is contained within them. Reading allows these silent voices to speak again. Books, in this way, are a bit of magic. They contain the voices of the long since passed, perfectly preserved exactly as the time they were written. They offer a peek through the curtain into a time that is not our own and, more importantly, deep into a mind that is not our own. Reading gives us the chance to do things we may never have the chance to do and learn from the most brilliant minds no matter the era they lived in. In a sense, we are able to experience for ourselves lives as numerous as the pages we flip through.
Each book, including all of the ones forced onto us in English class, has something uniquely important to contribute to the Great Conversation. As students, it is our job to learn from the humans that came before us and seek to keep their struggles and heartaches from reappearing in the future.
The purpose of reading is to listen in on a discussion that spans centuries with millions of voices, all at once, weaving together words with pen and ink, a picture of what it means to be human.
The book closet, though silent to the ear, is a boisterous epicenter for intellectual conversation. As we have been privileged to listen, we are also tasked to speak and carry on the torch of knowledge and imagination that is stubbornly fused within the human spirit.
To write for ourselves, to string together your own words, is to stand on a soapbox with all of humanity before and in front of you, open your heart, and bleed.