2024-04-05
Right now I’m reading The Socratic Method by Ward Farnsworth. In it, Farnsworth brings up Bertrand Russell, a philosopher who criticizes Xenophon’s writings on Socrates for not accurately portraying Socrates. The full quote goes like this:
“A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”
When I read this line, I felt an adverse reaction. It felt like this quote was talking about me.
I don’t claim to be an intellectual. Heck, I don’t claim to be smart, either. After all, here I am, taking Russell’s quote completely out of context to feed my own ego.
But this quote is why I often feel like I do disservice to literature by reading it. I feel like the point of a lot of literature never lands with me. I don’t notice clever things. I miss allusions to other works. I take a complex piece of literature and boil it down to a simple theme that may or may not have been a red herring. And every time I write about my thoughts or interpretations of a novel, I often feel like “a stupid man reporting.” What I may think is profound and well thought out, may not actually be. Maybe what I extract out of a book is too obvious. Or way off the mark. It’s embarrassing to think about.
But I keep reading literature. Because I still feel like I’m getting something out of it. I mostly use books as an introspective tool and even if I don’t “get” a book, I’m able to learn at least a little bit about myself. After reacting to certain characters or situations in a book, I can re-evaluate my values and tweak them a bit. I can uncover something about myself what was subconscious but suddenly put into words. I can add something from a book to my list of hopes and dreams.
It feels like a selfish way of reading. But that’s just the way I like to read. Of course, sometimes I like to just be plain entertained by what I read. But I want to be more than entertained. I want to learn and, afterwards, to summarize it all in “a stupid man’s report” (the stupid man is me and the report is also me).