And experience can be grasped both directly and from the retelling of artists. More here, from one of my latest discoveries, the talented and insightful writer Anthony Esolen:
“The young person who is steeped in history will be armed against the latest fashions in What Everybody Knows. He’ll understand, if but intuitively, that a study conducted by an eel, in the pot of eels, on the habits of the other eels, is going to be of limited applicability to raccoons foraging freely over the woods.
The young person trained by good books to look at the reality of things will be armed against the sophomoric skeptic. If you say to him, “Where is your proof that children are better off growing up with a married father and mother?” he will look at you, and rightly, as if you were a color blind person demanding proof of the existence of green. He might reply, “Do I need to wait for a sociologist to do a study to prove to me that children should play outside?” Of course they should grow up with a married mother and father. He sees in his mind’s eye Oliver Twist and the Dodger and the rest of the rabble of boys, huddling in the condemned building with Fagin, who teaches them to steal, and who secretly turns them over to hanging when he’s through with them. He sees Jane Eyre, and Esther Summerson, and Tom Jones.
You read good books to join in conversation with people who see farther or more deeply than most of us. You enter the quiet room with Jane Austen, who says, with a sly smile, “Is it really true that we understand our own desires? How often rather do we conceal them from ourselves by clever names? Didn’t young Emma do that, when she nearly spoiled the life of her young friend Harriet?” Robert Browning laughs from the corner, beckoning you to come near. “Miss Austen is surely right about that! But have you ever stopped to think that some people do evil by owning up to their desires and revealing them, at the right moment and to the right person? Allow me to introduce you to my Duke, and the painting of his last Duchess.”
“Yes,” says a slender, sober man in a tunic, who looks as if he’s spent most of his life listening and not speaking. “The Queen of Carthage was once a noble and pious woman, until she was seized by her dreadful desire. It spares no one.” He seems as if he were about to add something, but falls silent again.
“But there are two loves, and not just one,” says a man with a bishop’s miter, “and two cities, each built upon the foundation of one of those loves. The one city is called Babylon, and the other is called the New Jerusalem.”
“That first city’s name is Florence,” says a sardonic poet with a set jaw and an eagle’s beak for a nose. “I should know, because I lived there.”
“And they threw you out of the city,” says Browning, coming over to Dante to throw an arm around his neck. “By the way, that painting you said you were making of Beatrice, what happened to it? I would give more for that painting, just because you were not a painter, than I would for another fifty of your love poems, as highly as I esteem them!”
“But doesn’t my thought shine more brightly in the poetry, in which I’m skilled, than in a painting?”
“I don’t want your thought. I have that already. I want the human being in all his ordinary glory and weakness. I wrote a poem about that painting, you know. It was a love poem for my wife Elizabeth. Have you met her?”
You do not read good books so that you can scramble up some tricks, so that you can write clever things about them, so that you can do well on a test and secure a prestigious job and then die. You learn about the language and about what writers do, so that you can read good books and learn to love them, because they are companions who will tell you what they have seen of the truth, and they tell you it in a way you will not soon forget.”