Reading is essential for our education and personal development, but  do books bring happiness?  I posed this question to Professor  María Caballero Wangüemert,  Chair of Latin American Literature at the University of Seville . 

Maria kindly sent me this wonderful article:

“Sharing a story is sharing life, striving for a better world .” From childhood, we hear stories that reflect the odyssey of humankind, always in pursuit of happiness. And what is  happiness ? The supreme good for Plato and Aristotle, that is, virtue… Pleasure for Epicurus, although it eludes him… “Pleasure, money, power,” society tells us today. We like to be told stories, and to be told them well : great narratives have shaped the mentality of peoples; myth and literature were merely instruments to which cinema was added in the last century.

Sharing stories offers the possibility of freedom by making the world habitable through art. But why read  when we are surrounded by distractions—movies, on-demand television, video games—that offer more immediate pleasure with less effort?   The magic of language makes us human, and learning to read is finding the key to a new world,  a leap of power against the slavery that grips the illiterate. Unlike animals that merely survive,  an educated person is a free person who builds the world they inhabit . And they do so by cultivating the spirit, the only way to understand the meaning of our lives, the subject of so much excellent poetry. Because  man—as Pascal said—”is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but a thinking reed.”

Now comes the million-dollar question: “ What are the keys to choosing life-changing reading material? ” The question is beyond me. It’s obvious that without literature (both document and art form) it’s impossible to express oneself or understand oneself. A few  simple hints should outline my objective today: to whet your appetite  so you’ll dive into books (novels, poems, essays…) that will undoubtedly broaden your horizons when faced with questions that, as unique individuals, we must answer one by one, knowing, of course, that they connect us to the rest of humanity.

It’s wise to choose carefully because we are mortal and our time is limited. In any case, there are the  great books of world culture :  the Bible, the Arabian Nights, the Norse sagas, the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy … and others worth discovering. It’s important to reread the  classics  from our current perspective.  “What attracts us to the classics,” comments Carlos García Gual, “is that they continue to speak to us, to teach us, to intrigue us .” However, perhaps it’s best to start with A. Baricco’s version of  the Iliad  . Or with  Don Quixote  adapted by Trapiello, knowing that we will eventually reach the originals, but without overwhelming our young people with something that is still beyond their grasp. Because  the classics endure to this day, adapting flexibly to any kind of situation : the journey structure of  Homer’s Odyssey  is transformed into geographical displacement in   Joyce’s Ulysses (1922); or in an allegorical journey in  Dante’s Divine Comedy  (1321), a tour through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven guided by Virgil and Beatrice. Even in a journey of inner maturation in Goethe,  Delibes’s The Path  ,  Carrasco’s Out in the Open  , and many others.

The epic of the hero, almost always in verse and based on oral traditions,  recounts the warlike deeds of a heroic past, in which honor and fame defined the hero:  for example, the famous King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table in their quest for the Holy Grail.  Celtic mythology  has been fruitful for the history of the West.  Wagner’s operas serve as a prime example. Siegfried rides between history and legend in the famous tetralogy  *The Ring of the Nibelung* , performed so often in Bayreuth. A world of heroes that seems destined to disappear in our postmodern world. Are there no values ​​left? The “light man ” seems to dominate – (Rojas). But paradoxically, a renewed taste for epic narratives can be detected, with the subsequent moral rehabilitation of the hero (as seen in Tolkien’s * The Lord of the Rings *): good/evil with clear outlines that contribute to human identity. Because  “a world without role models lacks firm points of reference,” says psychiatrist Rojas. Progress is impossible!

We shift gears, from classical culture and barbarian myths to the Judeo-Christian heritage. To the question, what did Christianity contribute to Western literature ? Multiple answers arise: the  Bible , a literary wellspring for all time;  mysticism , an indestructible bridge between God and humankind, with figures like  Teresa of Ávila , whose  Life  is well worth reading; the  literature of converts ,  from Saint Augustine to Princess Borghese… including Claudel, Frossard, García Morente, Scott Hahn…;  apologetic literature  , which produced great essays and novels: Fabiola , by Cardinal Wiseman;  Apologia pro vita sua  (essay) and   Loss and Gain  (autobiographical novel), a double testament to Newman’s conversion;  the numerous stories of Lewis and Chesterton ;  Brideshead Revisited (1945, by Edward Waugh), a captivating novel about the workings of grace on eccentric and marginalized characters (the BBC version is extraordinary)… Christianity contributed much more, for example, the  theme of God in 20th-century novels : Sergei Undset, Henri Haase, Mauriac…, with a significant section on evil, masterfully crafted by Dostoevsky and Hannah Arendt… And when it seems that God no longer interests writers today, we find in the  postmodern novel a certain nostalgia for the lost God , for example, in  The Road  (2006), by the American McCarthy, an apocalyptic and postmodern vision of a father and son walking towards a dubious salvation after a nuclear catastrophe. Finally, there is  religious poetry , a hidden vein that surfaces in excellent writers: Gabriel Diedo, Juan María Pemán, Eugenia de Champourcín, a Republican and member of the Generation of ’27, Dámaso Alonso… and in generations Much closer to us are Miguel D’Ors, JJ Cabanillas, or C. Guillén who recently compiled an anthology under the title God in current poetry  (2018) . 

If I’ve managed to pique your interest even slightly, I recommend two essential books:  *The Infinite in a Reed*  (2019) ,  a bestseller about the book and everything surrounding it in Greece, Rome, and beyond—a book that survived the pandemic. I would read the first part. And a book from Homo Legens publishers   that I’ve just discovered, by  José R. Ayllón:  *What to Read as Soon as Possible: Some Books to Understand Life*  (2022).

Is a fulfilling life (A. Llano) possible without reading?  It gives me pause for thought…   Let’s recap : We read poetry to see reality differently, with intensity and feeling… We read novels to vicariously experience other lives, adventures that will never be our own…  We read to know, because knowledge is power,  and great literature, destined to endure, is capable of overcoming the false dichotomy of  docere/ludere :  reason is never at odds with genuine intellectual enjoyment.