A famous Edmund Burke quote reads: “Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.”
A not so famous, but similarly profound Wayne C. Booth quote reads: “It is not, then, that in identifying we stop thinking our own thoughts but rather that “our own” thoughts now become different from what they were.”
Both quotes take something that on the surface seems pretty straightforward, reading, and analyzes the hidden difficulties within this seemingly simple task.
For reading something, even in its entirety and not understanding where the author is coming from or what he is saying, is just as bad as leaving that book sitting on your shelf gathering dust.
Booth writes that as a reader, you have the responsibility of having to surrender yourself to the reading and its topic before you judge it.
I don’t get offended easily, and even if I do, generally I find it offensive to someone else, and not me personally. I believe everyone has the right to express their opinion. But in that same respect, if it causes harm to someone else, then it’s not an opinion, it’s just being cruel. This idea of having to actually embrace a writing before you “embrace” it, is revolutionary.
In today’s culture, people are quick to jump the gun at anything that seems even the least bit controversial. Booth goes onto say “when art and criticism are viewed as forms of conduct, they lead us into the very battles that we have hoped to escape by turning to art in the first place.”
I think that this just goes to prove that you cannot judge a book by it’s a cover, in every sense of the saying.
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