Doris Lessing on How to Read a Book and How to Read the World – Marginalian
Born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when he dropped out of school and eighty-eight when he won the Nobel Prize for melting language into keys to “the prisons we choose to live in.”
After living in writing for almost a hundred years, with the rise and fall of the dictatorship, the rise and fall of the movement, the stagnation of morals, he especially understood the power of the written word and its limitations, the way books should be read “in order to enlighten, expand the way one sees life” and not for the purpose of teaching a person to live a short and small life to replace a new life. or, worse, a view of life.
In his classic 1962 presentation The Golden Notebook (public library), shares his advice to young people about how to study for greater enlightenment:
There is only one way to read, which is to browse libraries and bookstores, pick up books that appeal to you, read only those, drop them when you are bored, skip the parts that are interesting – and never, ever read anything because you feel you have to, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that a book that worries you in your twenties or thirties will open doors for you in your forties or fifties – and vice versa. Don't read a book to you at its convenient time.
A century after Walt Whitman instructed in his advice on living a healthy and productive life to “reexamine everything you have been told in school or church or in any book. [and] discard anything that insults your soul,” he warns against reading books instead of reading the world, an admonition that is more applicable to the most common use of the written word today – algorithms that feed on easy choices and call them truth:
In this age of forced respect for the written word… people… miss what is right in front of their eyes… Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words. not written down. So don't ever let the printed page be your master.
In what might be the epitome of advice on how to study that doubles as an excellent summary of how to live, how to practice yourself and more, he adds:
Learn your way from one empathy to another… Follow your own intuition for what you need.
Coach Virginia Woolf on how to read a book, Vladimir Nabokov on what makes a successful reader, and Hermann Hesse on three types of readers, then revisit Lessing on saving humanity and the artist's work in times of crisis.
