Good Reading

Good reading, though it is not essentially an affectional or moral or intellectual activity, has something in common with all three.... The primary impulse of each individual is to maintain and aggrandise himself. The secondary impulse is to escape from the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness.... In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; 'he that loseth his life shall save it'.
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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.
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Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in 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, 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, Epilogue.