If our Life Story creates our identity, we must include the lives we have experienced and those we have lived. Author George R.R. Martin is credited with this quote: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
Another well-known author, Tony Hillerman, writing about the Navajo people and their traditions, said: “Everything is connected. The wing of the corn beetle affects the direction of the wind, the way the sand drifts, and the way the light reflects into the eye of a man beholding his reality. All are part of the total; in this totality, man finds his “hozro”, his way of walking in harmony, with beauty all around him.”
Learning more about others' human experiences can expand our own experience. To do so, we need to know about the characteristics, key events, and situations that compose the essentials of their lives: their struggles, conclusions, emotional responses, aspirations, and even their deaths.
Authors are the gatekeepers to the lives they write about and provide us with the pathway to their knowledge and experiences.
Harold Bloom, a well-known author and professor of literature at Yale, has written many books about many of the best authors. His book "Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human” claims that Shakespeare's vocabulary of 22,000 words is so infinite that it proves he knew pretty much everything there is to tell about humankind. According to Bloom, that fact and the totality of his writing means that Shakespeare “invented the human,” or at least a more complete definition of humanness.
In an interview published in 1995, Bloom reflected on the great authors of the Western world, stating: “We must read and study Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, and the Bible, at least the King James Bible.” He said of these authors that “they provide an intellectual, I dare say, a spiritual value which has nothing to do with organized religion or the history of institutional belief.” They tell us things we couldn’t possibly know without them; they reform and make our minds stronger. They make us more vital."
Bloom defines humanness using the stories and writings of authors rather than his own life story, but for Bloom, the authors he studied are a part of him.
Shakespeare’s quotes reflect a deep understanding of humanness that resonates with our lives today. I like these quotes, among many others.
• There is nothing good or bad; only thinking makes it so. - Hamlet
• Hell is empty, and the devils are here. - Shakespeare
• Though this may be madness, there is a method in it. - Shakespeare
• All that glitters is not gold – Shakespeare
• To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. – Shakespeare
The meaning of life is much more than our daily experiences and can include much from those other lives we read about. For example, we learned things from Hyenseo Lee, who told us in her book, “The Girl with Seven Names, Escape from North Korea,” that I am glad I can have some awareness of without having to have had the personal experience myself. Much comes to us and can be experienced in the nonfiction accounts of other people.
Even fiction gives us insight into our humanness. The suspense and twisting plots of Lee Child's Jack Reacher series take us to places we would never go and into situations we would never find ourselves in. We find excitement, empathy, and emotional experience in fiction. Literary critics often label a piece of writing as literature rather than fiction if it tries to describe the "human condition."
Poetry can also challenge the status quo in our lives and, by doing so, improve the human condition of all people. An example of this is in the work of May Angelou, who fought for equality and humanity, writing about the plights and triumphs of marginalized people.
What we learn about others by reading becomes part of the real meaning of our own lives.
