What do the few read for? “The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. … We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. … One of the things we feel after reading a great work is ‘I have got out.’ … Not only nor chiefly in order to see what they are like but in order to see what they see, to occupy, for a while, their seat in the great theatre.” Here, for Lewis, is the vital center of reading: “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege … But in reading great literature I become a thousand men, and yet remain myself.”

Mostly C.S. Lewis, qtd in Lanham, The Economics of Attention, 149