The College Beat: ARTICLE XIX
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When I open my phone, my Instagram feed offers me a list of five books I ought to read to become “disgustingly well educated” or “insufferable at dinner parties.” The first seems an oxymoron, and the second I could probably achieve on my own without reading anything.
Reading literature—especially physical books—has become a subculture. Reports abound with evidence of college students who cannot read a full book and aren’t being asked to do so. But as an English major and avid reader, I am unsatisfied with the Book Tok characterization of literature as an aesthetic or a lifehack to make you sound smart. I did not fully understand why until I read a French children’s book in my very last literature class of college.
Known for its childlike illustrations and subtle depth of thought, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince tells the story of an aviator who crashes his plane in the Sahara Desert and meets a little boy who has journeyed to earth from another planet. In eighty-three pages, the little volume quietly expresses just what we’re missing when we grow up and quit reading literature out of love.
On his journey, the little prince meets a fox who tells him he cannot play with him because he has not yet been tamed. When the boy asks him what “tamed” means, the fox responds, “It’s something that’s been too often neglected. It means, ‘to create ties.’”
“For me you’re only a little boy just like a hundred thousand other little boys,” the fox continues. “And I have no need of you. And you have no need of me, either. For you I’m only a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, we’ll need each other.”
Relationships create ties, and we become responsible for those things to which we are tied.
The prince protests he does not have time to tame the fox. He has other things to learn.
“The only things you learn are the things you tame,” the fox responds. “People haven’t time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends. If you want a friend, tame me!”
The little prince must be patient, the fox says. The process takes time. He must sit a little way away from him and then, day-by-day, return and sit a little closer.
He does, and somewhere along the way the two become friends, tied together. When they must part, the fox weeps.
Exupéry suggests a simple philosophy: Relationships create ties, and we become responsible for those things to which we are tied.
At its most obvious level, Exupéry’s insight concerns love in human relationships. But the same dynamic applies to the act of reading literature. After all, to read well is to develop a relationship—to create ties—with an author, a story, and characters.
This parallel didn’t sink in for me until I had to unpack my books from undergrad: The pages of War and Peace are dog-eared and annotated from three months of reading and rereading, the red dye has worn off the rounded corners of my complete works of William Shakespeare, and poor T. S. Eliot is now missing his cover completely. But when I look at them, I remember how each author moved me and informed my vision of the world—and for a moment I feel that movement again.
These great authors tamed me, in a way. The pages bear the evidence of the time and patient effort I offered to the books. In turn, each volume shaped my heart in subtle ways.
It’s a romantic idea, but a true one. When you read something, it becomes part of you and informs the way you approach people and ideas. The process seems obvious in children. As a child, books like Anne of Green Gables and Little House on the Prairie filled my imaginations and shaped my desires.
Then we grow up. If we read at all, it is likely out of a vague sense of duty or for practical purposes.
But engaging with literature is not about cultivating an aesthetic or cramming information into your head to regurgitate at parties. It’s a process of love—taking the time to approach the mind of an author with humility, prepared to be moved and create ties. When we stop reading literature, we risk losing that capacity altogether.