Does reading do us any good?

A wealthy young man, Marcel Proust, wrote that books do not make us better people. According to him, reading does not teach morality, does not turn us into model citizens, and does not equip us to impress at dinner parties with wise quotations. However, and here comes the twist, the true power of reading lies elsewhere: reading allows us to feel time passing without making it disappear. It connects us to memories; it allows us to relive the smells of houses that no longer exist, the voices of grandparents that no one else remembers. Proust took a stand against a revered authority like John Ruskin, who, on the other hand, viewed books as an army of brilliant minds ready to enlighten us, a sure investment to become wiser or more cultured. For Ruskin, reading was like sitting among the powerful, but with the certainty that you would always find someone to listen to you. Proust, on the other hand, said: Beware, reading is not a conference with the giants of history, but a silent miracle that happens only when you are alone with the pages. You can also get bored; you can find Shakespeare tedious; you can grasp things that even the author didn’t foresee. There is no ready-made moral; there is only the opportunity to discover parts of yourself that, without those words, you would never have imagined. Take Madame de Staël: as early as the 1800s, she argued that literature could be an instrument of freedom, preparing us to think independently—an education in freedom rather than a catechism of virtuous values. Yet, history repeats itself: each generation tries to enlist books for a cause, whether to teach goodness, to fight injustice, to defend tradition, or to revolutionize it. Today, the debate has moved online: some defend the “great books” because they teach morality, while others criticize them for not including enough diverse voices. But in the end, these discussions often treat books like pre-digested food, where the moral is served to you along with the plot. True literature, on the other hand, is more ambiguous, more slippery. Elena Ferrante, for example, uses her writing to show that there are no easy answers: the ending of The Lost Daughter leaves the reader without certainties, but with new questions they had never dared to ask themselves. Or Neige Sinno with Sad Tiger: she portrays incest without resorting to the rhetoric of trauma, leaving room for the reader to find their own meaning, precisely because literature never provides a direct answer. Here's a concrete fact: according to Proust, even mediocre books work, as long as they allow us to open a door to ourselves. You don't have to read only masterpieces to achieve this effect. And if this seems like a theoretical argument to you, think of 19th-century novels like Les Misérables or Crime and Punishment: these were not only social critiques; they were also mirrors in which very different readers recognized their own stories. The risk, however, is that the writer tries to represent “the nation” and ends up speaking only to a clique of like-minded people, thereby losing the freedom of language. The turning point comes when literature stops trying to be a moral guide or a tool of propaganda and becomes a training ground for ambiguity: it teaches us to dwell in doubt, to enjoy questions that have no simple answers. Today, when social media and the news push us to take a side right away, literature can remind us that the real pleasure lies in exploring, not in judging. The perspective that is often missing is this: while everyone wonders if reading serves any purpose, few notice that the true value of books lies in allowing us to savor complexity, not in providing us with pre-packaged answers. Therefore, reading does not make us better, but perhaps freer. The takeaway sentence is this: literature is not meant to give us certainties; it is meant to let us enjoy the search for truth. If you've experienced a change in perspective, you can mark it on Lara Notes with I'm In: this isn't about agreeing, but about saying, “This idea is now mine.” And if you happen to discuss it with someone, on Lara Notes you can tag them with Shared Offline: that way, that conversation remains, like an important memory. This Note comes from Aeon and saved you 12 minutes.