Books provide readers with the means to break the boredom of routine or the frustration of waiting rooms. They can provide for a reader escape and respite from difficult circumstances. At his boarding school, John Mortimer, of Rumpole fame, found he “desperately needed to inhabit another world far away from the icy dormitories, the bleak changing rooms that smelt of dirty gym shoes, and the numbing boredom of organized games.” Orphaned at an early age, both J.R.R.Tolkien and C.S. Lewis found such solace in ancient tales and sagas that they were able to draw upon them for inspiration when they later created their own mythic fantasies, compelling universes filled with terror and adventure, heroism and self-sacrifice. Fiction and non-fiction alike permit the reader to journey imaginatively to exotic places, other times, even unworldly dimensions. In his famous sonnet on reading, On Looking into Chapman’s Homer, the poet John Keats calls these destinations “realms of gold,” a phrase used centuries later by Margaret Drabble as the title of one of her novels. The reader travels to Xanadu with Coleridge, home to Ithaca and Penelope with Homer’s Odysseus, to Rome with Gibbon, to Agincourt battlefield with Shakespeare’s Henry V, to the kingdom of the Aztecs with Bernal Diaz, to Depression-era Maycomb, Alabama with Scout Finch, to revolutionary France with Dickens and Edmund Burke, to sleepy Mariposa with Stephen Leacock, the teeming tenements of Montreal with Mordecai Richler, pre-Taliban Kabul, Afghanistan, with Khaled Hosseini, revolutionary St. Petersburg with John Reed, and the Soviet gulag with Solzhenitsyn. We may tumble down a rabbit hole to Wonderland with Alice, and fly to Neverland with Peter Pan, or cruise into the New York of the Roaring Twenties in Jay Gatsby’s powerful roadster. The ambitious reader can even tour Purgatory, Hell and Heaven in the company of Dante Aligheri. He will meet in books saints and sinners, monsters and heroes, real people, people who never were, and people who might yet come to be. The American novelist Saul Bellow, the Chicago slum-bred son of impoverished Russian Jewish immigrants, once marvelled at how reading Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s elegiac novel about the declining fortunes of Catholic aristocrats in a rambling country house in England, had made him care passionately about what happened to them, despite the differences between their aspirations and circumstances and his own. Travel broadens the mind, but imaginative travel broadens it even more.
“The private act of reading,” says the critic Alberto Manguel, “allows you a sort of joyful immortality, and the illusion of limitless space and time as nothing else does on Earth.” We are “lured away from the little world of the self into whole galaxies of the imagination,” says the writer Gita Mehta, and Ursula LeGuin continues, “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become… There have been societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.” Maxim Gorky, the Soviet writer, has confided, “I came to appreciate what good books really were, and realized how much I needed them, and they gradually gave me a stoical confidence in myself. I was not alone in the world, and would not perish.” C.S. Lewis is reported to have echoed this sentiment in words attributed to him in the biographical film Shadowlands: “We read to know that we are not alone.”
