When people say they read for escapism, I can’t help feeling that they have missed a trick. Reading for me is not escapism – but a pathway in to reality, into the true nature of things. Fiction provides a roadmap for experience, a language to better articulate our inner lives – a way of making conscious that which only skimmed the surface before.
The quotations featured in MindLit are some of those that I have collected throughout my reading life, because there was something in them that captured exactly a feeling or thought from which there was much to learn or meditate on. Sometimes they express what we already know, but better than we know how to say, at other times they are startling fresh or challenging – for example a mirror to self-indulgent sorrow. They are words and phrases that I have carried with me – and it was only later, when I came to study mindfulness, that I saw the thread that held them together. Each MindLit post takes a passage or quotation from fiction that embodies a principle of mindfulness.
For Somerset Maugham “To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” For me, this refuge is not a retreat from suffering, it’s the place from which to view it more squarely, and to learn a way through it.
The MindLit posts can be read in any order.
