With temperatures in the high 70s and mid 80s this week in Nashville, we’re turning on our fans, unrolling our car windows, grabbing the allergy medicine and enjoying the defrosted outdoors. We can suddenly do whatever it is we want to do outside in the sun, which makes everything a little better. And sometimes there’s nothing more inspirational than reading really great literature, especially when you can read it outside in the warm sun.
For many of us, the most inspired and enthused we feel from ingesting culture– reading a book, listening to music, watching a movie– is when we’re young. Everything seems to affect us more strongly, more passionately when we’re seeing ourselves reflected back to us for the first time. As we grow up and our lives become more and more structured and busy, it’s difficult to feel such inspiration and movement again in ourselves, but sometimes reading a great piece of literature can create that spark once again.
C.S. Lewis once remarked, “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.” Indeed, literature nurtures and nuances our day-to-day responsibilities. And perhaps most importantly, it reveals to us possibilities we otherwise wouldn’t consider, and evokes responses and emotions in us that we may not have known we felt.
Of course, reading is one of the first things to be shelved as our lives become busied with distraction after distraction. But a life lived in the absence of inspiration eventually becomes grinding and stale. We all know what it’s like to feel empty and unoriginal; it’s akin to feeling like everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. It makes working on a presentation a grueling task because finding an interesting, creative way to present the information can seem impossible.
Kevin Hartnett muses on feeling revitalized while reading Haruki Murakami’s much- discussed, latest book 1Q84 in Great Fiction and 1Q84 excerpted from The Millions, a literary magazine, in Utne magazine. “Many nights I closed 1Q84 feeling hungry to go out and create something beautiful myself,” he writes. That’s the thing about great fiction: it moves us to create for ourselves something beautiful and important. It compels us to do, make, create something, anything, and it inspires us to become better versions of ourselves.
Harnett says that while reading 1Q84, “it occurred to [him] that wonder gives us heights, makes us consider new possibilities, motivates us not to linger where we are.” In short, the wonder brought forth by reading, causes us to look at the world in a different way, a way that can bring about new responses and new reactions to the world established around us.
Think of how much more nuanced and specialized your upcoming presentation could be if you’re creating it with a mind full of great fiction, non-fiction, short stories, poetry and the like. Reading is like amassing a treasure chest full of information, references, allusions, and descriptions that you can use however you see fit. If nothing else, reading opens the door to the new and wonderful possibilities our life can have. It allows us to dream, create and feel inspired.
So maybe on this Monday morning, you can start small by reading a poem, an essay or a short story. You don’t have to do the 52 books in 52 weeks challenge, and don’t continue reading a book you just can’t get into. Maybe you can start with a classic or a bestseller or the critics’ favorites. Either way, sometimes the hardest part is just beginning, so go ahead and grab that dusty book. Get comfy on the patio, basking in the sunlight, and read your little heart out.
