Is reading a substitute for experience?
Robert Southey has written a poem in which he speaks about the companionship books have given him. He says:
My days among the dead are past,
Around me I behold,
Where’er or these casual eyes are cast,
The mighty minds of old:
My ne’er failing friends are they,
With whom I converse day by day.
The poet says that books are his never-failing friends; in their company he derives delight, and seeks relief and solace while in sorrow. The poet’s words in praise of books show that reading is a panacea for personal ills as well as for empathetic understanding and for vicarious pleasure.
Wise men all over the world have extolled the value of reading. Bacon has this to say: “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man,” Lamb loves to lose himself in other men’s minds. That is to say, he likes to enjoy himself in the company of books, which as Milton has described, are ‘the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” In the words of Emily Dickinson
There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
Spencer’s observation, “Reading is seeing by proxy”, underscores the importance of reading in a man’s life. He sees the value of reading as a means to experience what the writer of a book has experienced himself. That is to say, the reader sees what the writer has seen personally from the book written by the latter.
Books are of different kinds; some give us useful information and knowledge; some give us the personal experiences of their authors; some are imaginative renderings of experiences. What we call creative literature belongs to the third category. When we refer to reading, we have invariably in mind the reading of imaginative literature. In other words, by `reading’ we mean reading novels, plays, poems, short stories, travelogues, autobiographies, etc. Imaginative literature is certainly different from books that are intended to pass on matter-of-fact, useful information and knowledge. The second category of books dealing with personal experiences such as autobiographies and travelogues is more akin to imaginative literature; for the books belonging to this category are ‘the precious life-blood of master-spirits’. Both categories of books, namely, imaginative literature and literature based on personal experience, give us what the writers have ‘seen’ for themselves.
The word ‘seen’ is placed within inverted commas because seeing is experiencing not only through our physical senses but also through our mind’s eye. What the poet imaginatively conceives is his experience; perhaps what he imaginatively conceives is based on personal experience. Wordsworth’s poem on the daffodils or his sonnet, “Upon Westminster Bridge” are imaginative renderings of personal experiences. The point is when we read imaginative works we are lost in the worlds created by the writers and experience with them their experiences. Our own experiences are only second-hand, and therefore, vicarious. This is what Spencer means when he says, “Reading is seeing by proxy’.
We may illustrate the above point with one or two examples. There is the famous novel, “One Day in the Life of lvan Denisovitch”, written by Alexandar Solzhonitsyn. The novel is an imaginative rendering of the author’s own experiences in a Siberian camp in the days of Stalin. This can be said of his other novels like Cancer Ward, First Circle, etc. The novels enable us to experience, imaginatively of course, what went on in Russia under the iron rule of Stalin. So too Pasternack’s Dr. Zhivago helps us see vicariously the conditions that prevailed in Russia at the time of the Revolution and the events that took place in the wake of the Revolution.
Reading novels enables us to understand the culture of a people. The Russian novels, the English novels, the American novels – all talk volumes about the peoples of the countries against the background of which the novels have been written. Charles Dickson’s Great Expectations, Nicholas Nickleby, etc., and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckloberry Finn, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, etc. and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Anna Karenina, etc., to mention a few novels, are examples.
Poetry is more intimate and personal than the novel or the drama. Poetry gives expression to recollections of experiences, present and past. Wordsworth has defined poetry as ’emotion recollected in tranquility’ and as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions’. What the poet deals with is his ‘felt’ experiences; reading poetry, therefore, enables us to ‘see’ what the poet has ‘seen’. The poet’s experiences may be mundane or spiritual. But his poetry opens up vistas for us.
Yes, reading is seeing by proxy. But is reading a substitute for experience? What we have stated above is that reading helps us experience vicariously what the poet, the novelist or the dramatist has experienced directly. Vicarious experience is only second-hand experience; it is not first-hand experience. There is a world of difference between first-hand experience and second-hand experience; one is direct, and the other is indirect. For instance, reading a travelogue and enjoying the scenes described in it is not the same as seeing the scenes and enjoying them ourselves. Reading is, therefore, only a substitute for experience, and riot experience itself. But then we cannot go through every experience ourselves; we have got to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ certain things through the eyes and ears of others.
