Some years ago, I was asked by a British television company to interview a well-known American politician. Then, a few years later, I was dispatched by a newspaper to profile a respected American film director. Naturally, I was grateful for the work. I was being paid and, as we all know, money buys time. I was also meeting two men whom I thought I might learn from and—of course—I did learn from them, but not in the way that I had hoped. I walked away from both interviews feeling distinctly uneasy, but it’s only now, as I look back across the years, that I can begin to understand the connective tissue between the discomfort I felt in both situations.
There’s an image I have in my mind of each one of you. You are a child curled up on a chair. Or perhaps seated beside a window with light streaming in. Or lying in bed with a flashlight. Wherever you are, you are lost in an imaginative world with other people: people who are participating in some kind of adventure. Perhaps a search for hidden treasure? Perhaps they are undertaking a journey to a strange place? Perhaps there is no adventure and they are simply arguing across a dining table? Whatever your people are doing, you are sitting quietly and paying attention as they travel purposefully across the bumpy topography of their lives. I can see all of you. You are captivated by them. You are reading.
Sadly, life is going to intervene. You will be offered distractions. Sport. Youthful romance. Television. Ambi-tion. Career. Children. As you grow older, the siren call of life will cause you to set down your book with more frequency. You will uncurl yourself. Rise from your window seat. Turn off the flashlight. Of course, there will not be a complete abandonment. School will demand that an engagement with imaginative literature becomes an obligation. And you will obey. At least for the duration of the semester. As your life unfolds, your relationship with reading will probably change, and opening books may well become a less essential part of your daily routine. However, you have no way of understanding that by disengaging with reading you risk drifting innocently towards danger. What kind of danger? Well, one way of addressing this question is to consider the zone of safety that is being left behind.
The child that was you—curled up in the chair, on the window seat, or lying in bed—was learning empathy. Among other things, you were being taught to recognize people’s anxieties and to respect vulnerability. The characters in the pages of your stories were not to be mocked, made fun of, voted off the island, ejected from the house, or subjected to the irritating rasp of a dismissive buzzer. They were not always good people, but even the disreputable have a story. By reading, you quickly discerned that the key to understanding people’s present-day behavior is most likely rooted in their pasts and, without realizing it, you were hitching the past to the present and learning history. Today, of course, you are fully cognizant of the fact that without some rudimentary grasp of history we are lost. You gained this knowledge by reading stories, and by reading stories you grew to respect the dignity of flawed and imperfect human beings. Safe within the solitude of the many stories you pored over, you became a citizen of the world, for the people you were reading about, more often than not, did not look like you. They came from unfamiliar cultural traditions. They embraced other forms of worship. They dressed differently. Spoke foreign languages. Ate strange food. Listened to peculiar music. But none of this was an obstacle to your understanding, and as you read assiduously in your childhood zone of safety, you joined a new—one might say, the real—family.
Why read? How else were you going to receive that most of precious gifts: an appreciation of the fact that we are all part of the same family, irrespective of race, religion, gender, sexuality, or any of the other irrelevancies that are meant to be an impediment to civil communication. By reading, you learned about your larger family—a family that extended beyond the people who were living with you under the same roof. By reading, you found kinship with Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler, Bigger Thomas, Laura Wing-field, Heathcliff, Madame Bovary, Tom Sawyer, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Willy Loman, Oliver Twist. These people became your companions, and the vicissitudes of their lives helped you to understand the turbulence of your own. In their company, you stepped out boldly beyond the citadel of self and listened patiently to stories that enabled you to recognize the members of your larger family when you finally encountered them; and, irrespective of their often irritating behavior, your first impulse was most likely not to judge and not to casually dismiss.
When we disengage with the act of reading imaginative literature, we risk a slow drift towards danger, a danger which often manifests itself by legitimizing an impatient rush to judgment. Given the precarious state of the present world, now is not the time to risk becoming shipwrecked on the rocky shores of certitude. In fact, now is the time to fully embrace the dignity of not knowing. Now is the time to cultivate the art of listening. Now is the time to seek direction from writing that explores what William Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Reading encourages us to accept the puzzling ambiguities of our all-too-short individual lives, and also to recognize the historical footprints in the snow that we make as the human family holds hands and shuffles forward from one era to the next. Reading helps us, the human tribe, to better understand one another.
Many years ago, I posed—to both the well-known politician and the respected film director—the same question. I asked them: “What do you read?” The politician leaned back in his chair and unthreaded his fingers, which had been loosely knitted together. He then placed the palms of both hands down on his desk and snapped, “I don’t have time to read.” The interview had descended from a cordial welcome, by way of increased tetchiness, to this dismissive retort. The images I had of him a quarter of a century earlier, when he marched by the side of Dr. King, didn’t square with the impatient man seated before me. And, naturally, I wondered if this disdain for the act of reading might be somehow informing his present irritability.
When I asked the film director the same question, he smiled and let me know that his time was limited and so he only read history books. As it transpired, his answer helped me to better understand his work. His more “serious” films, while technically impressive, often felt somehow emotionally unadventurous. It’s difficult to know how redemptive reading fiction about the interiority of people’s lives might have been for this man in his professional work, but—and this was also true for the politician—I couldn’t help feeling that an infusion of the kind of empathy one gains when reading about the tender susceptibilities that can damage the lives of our fellow travelers might well have proved useful.
Why read? Because if you look around today’s globe at those who wield power, and consider not what they read, but if they read, you will have good reason to be alarmed. Since my encounter with the politician all those years ago, I have, to this day, made a practice of speculating as to the reading habits of successive so-called leaders and arriving at increasingly depressing conclusions.
Why read? Because, frankly, in these difficult times reading imaginative fiction may well be the most powerful tool we have to redirect our attention towards a much-needed sense of non-judgmental tolerance and compassion.
There’s an image I have in my mind of all of you. Before that innocent drift towards danger. And certitude. You are a child curled up on a chair. Or perhaps seated in a window with light streaming in and making a Vermeer of the room. Or perhaps you are lying in bed with a flashlight. You are lost in an imaginative world with other people. And whatever it is your people are doing or saying, you are sitting quietly and listening to them. You are reading.
Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts, grew up in Britain, and has lived in the United States for many years. He is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, most recently Another Man in the Street. His “Why Read?” was originally delivered as the Blashfield Address at annual Ceremonial of the American Academy of Arts and Letters on May 21, 2025.