A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.
Interpretation
A powerful book immerses the reader in diverse experiences, making them feel as if they have lived multiple lives.
William Styron articulates the transformative power of literature, suggesting that a truly great book not only entertains but also enriches the reader's life by offering deep, varied experiences. The act of reading should be an engaging journey that leaves one feeling a sense of fulfillment and emotional fatigue, akin to living through multiple lifetimes.
In practice
During a book club meeting discussing the latest novel.
The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses, near paralysis, psychic energy throttled back close to zero. Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it.
This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair.
In depression . . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute . . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
Writing is a fine therapy for people who are perpetually scared of nameless threats... for jittery people.
Any genuine teaching will result, if successful, in someone's knowing how to bring about a better condition of things than existed earlier.
If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.
Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books?
My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.
A well organized education should not be one which prepares students for a good remuneration alone. It should be one that can help and guide them towards acquiring clear thinking, a fruitful mind, and an elevated spirit.
The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can't do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That's how you make it all of one piece.
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