Welcome to The PATH (Monday Meditation) — A weekly reflection with three timeless insights for daily life. This week’s reflection searches for ancient lessons on reading and the good life (Reading, Thinking, and The Good Life).
1. Reading
What is your favorite book (or quote)? Strangely, reading the words of others can propel us toward a better life. But how should one choose their reading list? What books lead to the good life? These are the types of questions I asked Karen Swallow Prior (a previous podcast guest), the author of On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books.
In my interview with Prior, she explained, “Reading well is, in itself, an act of virtue, or excellence, and a habit that cultivates more virtue in return.”
Before I began writing this book, I fell in love with the classical philosophy around virtues, especially Aristotle, later Aquinas. And so when I sat down to write the book, I was really writing it in a way for me, I wanted to know what these virtues are, how they’ve been defined, and then how we see them embodied in real life.
Reading richly layered prose or poetry requires us to pay attention. It requires us to slow down, reflect, and imagine the world through other eyes. Prior revealed that she did not realize until later in life how much being a reader shaped her thinking, perspective, and even virtues.
Reading and the Good Life
Are you interested in starting (or continuing) a reading practice focused on the good life? If so, I’m starting a free weekly meetup beginning on Friday, 4 Nov (Sign up here and see additional details below):
Every Friday at 12:00 pm EST (over Zoom)
Conversations on the art of living through great books
Here are a few potential books to start: New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (4-6 weeks per book).
Open to any suggestions…
Reading, Connection, and the Good Life
2. Thinking
“Everything hangs on one’s thinking,” wrote Seneca to Lucilius. He warned against reading too widely. Seneca said, “Be careful not to read many authors and every type of book. It may be that there is something wayward and unstable in it.” One must stay with a limited number of writers and be fed by them if you mean to derive anything that will dwell reliably within you.
“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
— Henry David Thoreau
It is not enough to read wisely. One must also read well. One must read virtuously. Reading offers images of virtue in action and allows the reader to practice exercising virtue in their mind. “The reading of all good books,” wrote the French philosopher Rene Descartes, “is like a conversation with the finest people of past centuries.”
These conversations with those who have come before us have a way of training our minds. “There is something in the very form of reading — the shape of the action itself — that tends towards virtue,” writes Prior in On Reading Well.
3. The Good Life
“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions,” observed the astronomer Carl Sagan, “binding together people, citizens of distant epochs who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time — proof that humans can work magic.” There is no doubt there is wisdom in reading.
But there is also wisdom in writing through the practice of self-reflection.
My interview with the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci (author of A Field Guide to a Happy Life) revealed the following insights on journaling:
Journaling is similar to writing a diary. But there are major differences with the way in which people normally write a diary and particularly to number one; you try to write things in objective terms. By things I mean, what happens to you in your life. If there are any salient episodes during the day that I think are worth recording in my journal, I will do it using the most objective, detached language possible and try especially to stay away from emotional language as much as possible.
The practice of reading helps us to reflect objectively on our lives. It helps us to gain a deeper understanding of the good life and the courage to examine our actions. As Seneca advised, “When the lamp is taken out of my sight…, I pass the whole day in review before myself and repeat all that I have said and done. I conceal nothing from myself and omit nothing.”
Although reading is not the same as stillness or contemplative practice, it seems to deliver similar benefits of increasing awareness and understanding of our place in the world. But it is important to remember that the practice of reading is not an end. To quote the American philosopher Mortimer Adler,
The point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
P.S. Sign up for Reading and the Good Life for weekly conversations on the art of living through great books (Every Friday at 12:00 pm EST over Zoom).