“Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls,
For thus, friends absent speak…”
-John Donne, “To Sir Henry Wotton”
Happening upon a book you once enjoyed can bring a surge of affectionate feeling and your heart seems to say, “Hello, Old Friend!” Yes, it’s just a book, but within the book, you can commune with others. Books that have stood the test of time offer worthwhile characters and ideas that have been enjoyed by generations of readers. You are united to the author and all who have spent happy hours in his or her companionable presence on the printed page.
While books might cost a few dollars, or many dollars if they are rare, the experience of conjuring a scene or idea is free. The experience of reading is an immaterial one. Because of this, what we desire upon reading can be both material and immaterial.
There are many material desires that can arise in reading a book. There are many books written in times of deprivation, wartime, and famine that luxuriate in lengthy descriptions of extravagant meals. The frequent literary homages to steaming cups of coffee will drive the recent coffee abstainer to distraction. Sensual books can stir up destructive passions that require discernment in the reader. This does not mean that all sensual material should be banned, but that it is foolish to make it widely and undiscriminatingly available.
Here, we should offer a brief clarification: romance novels are not books in the full sense. They are trash. Women—and, I suppose, men if they are degraded to feminine vice—should not delude themselves into thinking that they are “reading” when they read romance novels. The cutesy terms dreamed up by fans to make reading filth seem like an acceptable pastime should be rebuked soundly.
Good books can cause us to want food and affection, beautiful clothes, a soft bed, and a good night’s sleep. What about immaterial goods?
Earlier this year, I was edified by philosopher John Cuddeback’s reading of St. Thomas Aquinas. He explained, “A spiritual thing is not known unless it is possessed.” In other words, we want faith, friendship, and other spiritual goods only if we already have faith and friendship. When we lack companionship, we can fail to recognize the longing in our heart as loneliness, because it requires the having of friends to want friends.
Perhaps I’m exaggerating or oversimplifying, but that’s how I understood the Angelic Doctor through Mr. Cuddeback’s compelling post. I would suggest that in books, we can, through well-crafted characters, come to possess by proxy some spiritual goods. There is no substitute for real, live, and in-person. Reading about someone in a tight-knit family gathered around a cozy fire is but a sliver of a shadow of the real thing. And yet, I think it can convey some shred of that reality. Could possessing that shred be the beginning of longing for a spiritual good?
Ending a beloved book produces the pain of feeling estranged from people you knew and loved. They were not real, but they might have become like good friends to us. It is a great leap to imagine as a lonely person reading about close friendship that finding friends in the flesh is possible, but I suspect it can be a beginning.
So, too, as I mused upon first encountering Mr. Cuddeback’s thoughts, the experience of young children can be joyfully lived through reading about them. It is not living in full and it may not cultivate in us a desire for the presence of children, but it opens up the possibility. When children are few and far between in many places, books that faithfully depict the joys and gifts of young children are a powerful way to introduce a desire in our hearts that we cannot comprehend until we have felt the presence of it.
Reflecting on how powerfully are felt the spiritual goods in a good story, I wonder if that is part of the literary charm of poverty. There is, of course, nothing romantic about not having enough to eat and being orphaned and cold. And yet, so many best beloved stories are about impoverished orphans, often very cold ones. Material poverty is not the point of these stories; they are stories of great spiritual possessions. It is as though the lack of safety and security in material goods highlights all the more the riches of spiritual goods the characters possess.
No one wants to see a child struggling to collect coal and drag it across town in the dark. But isn’t it strange that when we see Joey Moffat doing just that we can almost feel jealous of him once he finally does succeed and settles down to the warmth of the stove with his close and loving family? Thankfully, the story invites us in; we are, but for a moment and at a distance, part of that warm and happy scene. We don’t have to feel jealous because we, the readers, get a taste of the spiritual banquet at which the characters feast.
The best books are not ends in themselves; through forming the moral imagination, the interior landscape of what we know to be possible and desire, good books can inspire action to attain the spiritual goods we read about in our own lives. Thus, books have been great friends to me.
