Food for Thought

"Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into subindividuality.
But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."


C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961), 140-41.