Lewis pontificates on the art of reading well. “The first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement an furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before…. Scenes and characters from books provide them with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experience.”
Lewis steps back to describe what makes a reader a good reader. “The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way…. The distinction can hardly be better expressed than by saying that the many use art and the few receive it…. We must never assume that we know exactly what is happening when anyone else reads a book…. No novel will deceive the best type of reader. He never mistakes art either for life or for philosophy. He can enter, while he reads, into each author’s point of view without either accepting or rejecting it, suspending when necessary is disbelief and (what is harder) his belief…. Every episode, explanation, description, dialogue—ideally every sentence—must be pleasurable and interesting for its own sake…. It is very natural that when we have gone through the ordered movements which a great play or narrative excites in us—when we have danced that dance or enacted that ritual or submitted to that pattern—it should suggest to us many interesting reflections…. But we had better not feather on them the philosophical or ethical use we make of it.” Lewis concludes, “And if it is worth while listening or reading at all, is is often worth doing attentively.”
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