Each year for the month of October I like to pick out a few horror, or in someway related to Halloween, books to read. This year one of the books I chose was, Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, a novel about two teenage boys who visit a dark carnival that comes to their hometown a week before Halloween. I’d decided to read it just looking for a good Halloween story, which it was, but more than that it turns out. There were some standout passages in which one of the boy’s fathers philosophizes about life and being a good person.
Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light. The seal-barker, the laugh-shouter, half the time he’s covering up. He’s had his fun and he’s guilty. And men do love sin, Will, oh how they love it, never doubt, in all shapes, sizes, colors, and smells. Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites. Hear a man too loudly praising others, and look to wonder if he didn’t just get up from the sty. On the other hand, that unhappy, pale, put-upon man walking by, who looks all guilt and sin, why, often that’s your good man with a capital G, Will. For being good is a fearful occupation; men strain at it and sometimes break in two. I’ve known a few. You work twice as hard to be a farmer as to be his hog. I suppose it’s thinking about trying to be good makes the crack run up the wall one night. A man with high standards, too, the least hair falls on him sometimes wilts his spine. He can’t let himself alone, won’t lift himself off the hook if he falls just a breath from grace.
Have I said anything I started out to say about being good? God, I don’t know. A stranger is shot in the street, you hardly move to help. But if, half an hour before, you spent just ten minutes with the fellow and knew a little about him and his family, you might just jump in front of his killer and try to stop it. Really knowing is good. Not knowing, or refusing to know, is bad, or amoral, at least. You can’t act if you don’t know. Acting without knowing take you right off the cliff.
Another book I read throughout October was The Stand, by Stephen King, about a super flu accidentally released which kills 99% of the population and an ensuing struggle to decide who will control and rebuild society. In addition to lessons about being a better person, there some interesting commentary on society as the characters were figuring out how to rebuild civilization and society after much of what we take for granted was damaged or destroyed.
Men who find themselves late are never sure. They are all the things the civics books tell us the good citizens should be: partisans but never zealots, respecters of the facts which attend each situation but never benders of those facts, uncomfortable in positions of leadership but rarely able to turn down a responsibility once it has been offered … or thrust upon them. They make the best leaders in a democracy because they are unlikely to fall in love with power. Quite the opposite.
Show me a man or a woman alone and I’ll show you a saint. Give me two and they’ll fall in love. Give me three and they’ll invent the charming thing we call ‘society’. Give me four and they’ll build a pyramid. Give me five and they’ll make one an outcast. Give me six and they’ll reinvent prejudice. Give me seven and in seven years they’ll reinvent warfare.
Many people read non-fiction because they want to read things that are true, but sometimes fiction can say true things much shorter and simpler than non-fiction. When reading fiction as you’re following along with the characters and sharing their experiences you can absorb ideas and feelings that may not necessarily being explicitly expressed in the words of the story, but are still conveyed through the character’s experiences and their reactions to them. While thinking about this I was reminded of a quote from V for Vendetta:
Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.
In addition to telling truths that may not otherwise be expressible, fiction can have it’s own lasting effects, just like non-fiction. Reading non-fiction can build up your knowledge and store of facts, reading fiction can build up your empathy, helping you relate to others better and easier as found in a study of the effects of reading various types of books. By spending time reading fiction and experiencing life through someone else’s perspective, we are better able to understand the perspectives of those around us in real life. Thereby hopefully causing us to treat others better or perhaps take a step back when someone doesn’t treat us so well and trying to see things from their perspective, hopefully seeing why they may have done what they did.
To maximize the benefits of reading it’s therefore important to read a variety of genres and include both fiction and non-fiction in your reading. If you only read fiction, try to find a non-fiction book about a topic you are interested in, perhaps something you’ve always wanted to know more about, a historical event, or even a person. If you only read non-fiction, try to mix in a fiction book every once in a while, see things from someone else’s perspective, and hopefully get lost in a good story. If you don’t read a all, start small, maybe a book a month, alternating fiction and non-fiction. And if you already read a variety of books, keep doing what you’re doing.