I want to just say a few things about the pleasures of reading, not as an obligation, but rather for pleasure in the midst of a busy, distracted, worried, stressed, and saturated life. I suspect those adjectives describe many lives during this turbulent year, A.D. 2020.

There is a stillness in reading, even when the story, character, or idea one reads is exciting. One turns down the voices that assail all day; the parent voice that worries what the kids are into while your back is turned (interruptions are fewer and this feeling is more prudently ignored when they are in bed) dissipates. The outrages of the news recede (unless you’re reading matters concerned in some way with the news of the day) and one can go inward. By “inward” I mean you don’t need a screen to have an experience, don’t need a pundit, another voice, a commercial sales job; what happens inside you happens according to what your own mind produces on the basis of words on a page. Your meditations with a book are guided, but they are your own.

Reading for pleasure is a way to turning aside the world in an escapist sense. Of going somewhere else and coming back changed. Indeed, escapism means even the possibility of momentarily slipping your skin and being someone else entirely. There’s a tremendous power in being able to leave oneself, one’s life, one’s own ideas and to inhabit another world, another mind, and another way of being in the world for a time, and then to be able to return changed to the life you were living. It means seeing yourself and your problems and your hopes and your joys in new ways, ways that will continue to shift as you continue to read and think and grow, but always with a wider perspective the more voices and ideas you can drink in and consider and synthesize into something that is totally yourself and unique.

Increasingly, I am convinced that reading for pleasure is a balm for the frenetic stream of outrage, drivel, and fear generated or transmitted by other media. It is in books we can find sanctuary, and wisdom, as individuals and as a culture. In turning away from the screen and toward the written page, we may turn also from the madness roiling our world.