C. S. Lewis: Why You Should Read Old Books
On whether literary greatness exists and, if it does, where to find it.
Welcome to “Words of Wisdom”, a series that zooms in on a passage of writing — an essay, a chapter, a speech — from a great thinker on a specific topic.
Today, C. S. Lewis: Christian apologist, author of the Narnia series and sci-fi novels, master of the pitch-perfect analogy, through which he was able to render an idea immediately intelligible to his reader. He was surely one of the greats.
Last year, the New York Times ran a piece questioning the importance of Great Books.1 It was written by A. O. Scott, whom I’ve quoted approvingly in the past on the topic of criticism2 — here, he seems to have given in to philistine populism. Perhaps the most telling, and the most damning, line in the article is this: “The great books are the ones you’re supposed to feel bad about not having read.” This comes soon after having claimed that great books are also, by definition, not the books we read for pleasure.
A parry to the dull blade of this attack has come from the digital pages of Substack, where, it seems, everyone is reading Middlemarch and having a blast. Great books might be out of favour with the traditional literati, but the classics are back in fashion here on Substack. Just look at the success of
(where Henry Oliver wrote a bracingly lucid response to the Times article3), , , and (which covered the Middlemarch renaissance4).My own reading life has inadvertently followed the same trend. My tastes have always eddied around the late twentieth century, from which I read everyone from Shirley Jackson to Penelope Lively to Philip Roth. Last year, I wanted to understand the contemporary fiction scene, so I prioritised new books. Each time I reached in and pulled something out of the latest offerings, I never knew if I was going to find a nugget of gold or a handful of coal, though by the end of the year my hands were more dusty with soot than filled with treasure.
So, this year, I’m returning to the classics from earlier than my late-twentieth-century wheelhouse, with a mix of re-reads and first-timers. I’ve read The Great Gatsby — for only the second time — and its title is not false advertising; Pride and Prejudice, a long-time favourite, was my way of easing into the Austen I’m yet to read; later this year, I’ll be taking up Jane Eyre and Silas Marner for the first time. Each book reveals its own set of wisdom, but the collective takeaway came quickly: these books remain with us because they are, in fact, great. Sometimes, the truth is quite simple.
C. S. Lewis ranks among the greats. A prolific writer, Lewis left us many books we could examine, but today I want to bring you his words from a short essay called “On the Reading of Old Books”.5 In it, he argues that books from “yesterday” are often more deserving of our attention than new books. Though he never states it explicitly, it’s clear that, for him, “old books” might as well be synonymous with “great books” — but that doesn’t rule out more recent books from the status of greatness. The devil’s in the details, and the divine is in nuance.
“There is a strange idea abroad,” Lewis begins, “that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books.” This strange idea looks suspiciously like the notion that great books, in their esoteric difficulty and ontological opposition to pleasure, are the preserve only of those studying literature, or engaging in high-minded criticism. Normal people should stick to those page-turners concerned with escapism rather than exploration and explanation.
Lewis is sympathetic with those who buy this line because of humility. Having noted that a student of a discipline will avoid reading Plato’s Symposium for himself, preferring instead to “read some dreary modern book ten times as long” that synopsises Plato’s thought, Lewis explains it this way:
“The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew that the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.”
I’ve had many conversations with people in my own life who feel too timid to pick up a classic novel. There’s a sense that reading Homer, or Shakespeare, or even Dickens is an intellectual workout that only a Herculean reader will be up to; these people tell me they’re still in the featherweight category and believe they must “work their way up” to the great works of literature.
To be sure, it’s not that the move from a modern YA novel to Tolstoy is something the average reader won’t blink at, and there’s often a transition required to adapt your readerly mind to the syntax, punctuation, and thematic ambiguity of great novels. But that transition is often much easier, much less prolonged, than people think it will be. In my own experience, it’s less of a gradual climb to the top of a mountain, and more of a flip of a switch: you struggle through a few pages or a chapter, and then, like one of those magic eye pictures, you suddenly see it.
Many readers are also anxious that they won’t “get” everything there is to get out of great literature. A reader might have heard others parsing out the intricacies of political commentary buried deep in the subtext of a middle chapter in a 900-page novel, or read about the social criticism written in that invisible ink apparently found “between the lines” of a text, and she worries she won’t have the skills required to discover all of that for herself. And there’s a good chance that she won’t — and that’s fine. Lewis points out that you might not understand all of what the writer was saying, but you’ll understand enough of it because they were a great writer.
It can’t be avoided that Lewis is taking aim at the practice of reading summaries of great books rather than just reading the books. I might offer a brief defence of what I’m doing here with this series (and what many of the best writers on Substack are doing when they write about great novels). The criticism Lewis makes is against the commentary acting as a substitute for a classic novel. He writes:
“It has always therefore been one of my endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”
Reverence for the firsthand over the secondhand in wisdom is precisely why I include excerpts of the original here in my essay. More importantly, I see my role as that of verbose signpost, celebrating great writing in the act of directing readers towards it. I never want anything I write about a book to stand in place of the book itself. Everything I write here can be distilled to: Close this browser and open the book! Read it for yourself — it’s worth it!
When it comes to modern books, Lewis was no reactionary. “Naturally, since I myself am a writer,” he admits, “I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books.” He even gives advice on a considered diet of reading:
“It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old to every three new ones.”
So, not no modern books, but a balance between the old and new. Modern books might not have yet had time for the selection of generations to winnow out the great from the thankfully-vanished bad, but that doesn’t mean there’s no greatness to be found among them. And a mere half-century is enough to begin separating the eternal from the temporary, to sift glittering wisdom from the silt of the banal. Much ephemera won’t yet be strained out, and, as the bard tells us, not all that glitters is gold — but some of it will be.
That said, Lewis does argue for the particular qualities of older books, as opposed to great books in general, and it’s worth paying that some attention. First, he tells us that only reading new books is a good way to shut yourself out of the fullness of the conversation:
“If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see why — the reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point. In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book.”
This reminded me of reading
’s latest novel and recognising its opening line: “It was a strange, sultry summer, the summer of the Subway Pricker, but Brooke Orr had decided not to let that interfere with the business of life in New York.” Anyone who hasn’t read The Bell Jar won’t have their reading of the novel coloured by this association as mine was — indeed, it gave the book’s name, Entitlement, a whole new spin. You’ll still get much out of Alam’s book if you haven’t read Plath’s classic, but you won’t get as much as you could. This is true of every great book, which is inevitably in conversation with previous books.The second reason to value old books is that, as Lewis points out, “Every age has its own outlook”:
“It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.”
Every society takes certain things for granted and shares modern values and viewpoints. It’s incredibly difficult for anyone living through the modern moment to clearly see these assumptions — many of which will turn out to be false — and will therefore perpetuate them:
“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century — the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ — lies where we have never suspected it ... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.”
Our best defence against the underscoring of bad ideas is the clarifying light thrown on our disorder by the books of the past. “Not, of course,” Lewis is quick to point out, “that there is any magic about the past.”
“People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us.”
Indeed, witnessing the errors of the past — seeing clearly what they couldn’t back then, and seeing the extent to which even the smartest minds fell for those errors — often prises open a crack in our own temporality, our subjectivity, to hint at what we might be getting wrong ourselves. It’s humbling to realise that minds greater than your own made mistakes that you can now see through, causing you to realise in turn that future minds will see mistakes you are blind to today. “To be sure,” Lewis writes, “the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
We do, however, have greater access now than at any time in human history to the best ideas, the most beautiful prose, and the most edifying and entertaining stories of the past. We should make use of them, because they are our best bulwark against the particular idiocy of our time. As Lewis puts it:
“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
Though originally written as an introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation, today the essay is more easily found in a posthumous collection of Lewis’ writings called God in the Dock (1970).