Why Read

Why Read?

I just can't look outside of what it might be like to have an intellect and sensibility formed by interaction with texts. Or can I? After all, I sympathized heavily with Alvarenga (an illiterate man, lost at sea) - so perhaps, after all, this is the answer to the vexed question of why we should read: so as to anticipate, understand, and so connect with the non-literate realms that surround us - whether we be separated from them by reason of space or time or technology.
So why read? Read because short of meeting and communing with them (and perhaps, because of this, writing about them), reading about diverse modes of being and consciousness is the best way we have of entering into them and abiding.

Kafka at 19: "The most important or charming was the wish to achieve a view of life (and - this was necessarily bound up with it - to convince other people of it in writing), in which life maintained its natural heavy rise and fall, but at the same time would be recognized, no less clearly, as a void, a dream, a floating."
The adult Kafka reached a mystical appreciation of his youthful velleity, characterising it as a desire both to expertly hammer together a table and at the same tim "do nothing". The inanition would validate the craftsmanship involved, freeing it to become "even bolder, even more resolute, even more real and, if you like, even more insane".