The School of Life

Around 130 million books have been published in the history of humanity; a heavy reader will at best get through 6,000 in a lifetime. Most of them won’t be much fun or very memorable. Books are like people; we meet many but fall in love very seldom. Perhaps only thirty books will ever truly mark us.

They will be different for each of us, but the way in which they affect us will be similar.

The core, and perhaps unexpected, thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise and clarify our concerns – and in this sense simplify them.

We need simplification because our minds become checkmated by the complexity of our lives. The writer, on rare but hugely significant occasions, puts into words feelings that have long eluded us; they know us better than we know ourselves.

Our relationships are too compromised and fraught. It can feel too risky to be very nice to someone who might not reciprocate. So we don’t do much feeling; we freeze over. But then, in the pages of a story, we meet someone. Perhaps she is very beautiful, tender, sensitive, young and dying; we weep for her and all the cruelty and injustice of the world. And we come away, not devastated, but refreshed. Our emotional muscles have been exercised and their strength rendered newly available for our lives.

Literature corrects our native inarticulacy. So often we feel lost for words. We are impressed by the sight of a bird wheeling in the dusk sky; we are aware of a particular atmosphere at dawn; we love someone’s slightly wild but sympathetic manner. Yet, we struggle to verbalise our feelings; we may end up remarking: ‘that’s so nice’. Our feelings seem too complex, subtle, vague and elusive for us to be able to spell out. The ideal writer homes in on a few striking things: the angle of the wing; the slow movement of the largest branch of a tree; the angle of the mouth in a smile. Simplification does not betray the nuance of life: it renders life more visible.

When approached in the right way, travel can play a critical role in helping us to evolve; it can correct the imbalances and immaturities of our nature, open our eyes, restore

Part of the reason why being interested in politics has traditionally had high prestige is that it seems a selfless act, a noble prioritising of communal over personal interests. But this too may be an unhelpful starting point, because it privileges a sacrificial impulse that few of us reliably experience. In reality, being political need have nothing to do with self-renunciation. Making strangers happy is deeply enjoyable, and a great deal easier than trying to make oneself or one’s immediate loved ones content.

Living in our own minds, we have a constant experience of impotence and failure. Much the same may hold true of our relationships with those close to us. We know how often our initiatives go nowhere, our plans are rebuffed, our intentions are ground down. Politics is a refuge from the problems of trying to make oneself and one’s loved ones smile. It is the best possible kind of selfishness.

Acting politically, we can bring our most competent, purposeful selves to bear on a relatively limited set of issues in the lives of strangers, and therefore have a chance of succeeding. We are not trying to solve all the problems of others; we are merely working on one or two targeted areas and so are granted a precious encounter with ourselves as people with the will, imagination and intelligence to get things done. We are taken out of the morass of our own minds. We have the joy of trying to change the world, rather than wrestling with the far thornier task of wondering how to be happy.

Our encounter with nature calms us because none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes has any relevance to it.