Fire and Knowledge

Never force yourself to read a book that you do not enjoy. There are so many good books in the world that it is foolish to waste time on one that does not give you pleasure.

–Atwood H. Townsend, quoted in The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life (2005) by Steve Leveen, p. 10

When the boy passes from nursery literature to school stories he is going down, not up.

–C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), p. 35

[L]anguage is the soil, the seedbed, of meaning. And the works of language, our literatures, have been the repository of our collective speculation.

—Sven Birkets, The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), p. 31

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise 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….

[I]n 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 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, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), pp. 140-1

We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves…. We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own…. We demand windows. Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), pp. 137-9

I suggest that a ten or twenty years’ abstinence both from the reading and from the writing of evaluative [literary] criticism might do us all a great deal of good.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), p. 129

[E]very book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment, in this sense, is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), p. 91-2

[G]ood reading is always aural as well as visual. For the sound is not merely a superadded pleasure, though it may be that too, but part of the compulsion; in that sense, part of the meaning. This is true even of a good, working prose.

—C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (1961), p. 90