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About This Author
My name is Joy, and I love to write.
Why poetry, here? Because poetry uplifts its writer, and if she is lucky enough, her readers, too. Around us, so many objects abound to write about. Once a poet starts with a smallest, most trivial object, he shall discover that his pen will spill out what is most delicate or most majestic hidden inside him. Since the classics sometimes dealt with lofty subjects with a lofty language, a person with poetry in his soul may incline to emulate that. That is understandable. Poetry does that to a person: it enlarges the soul and gives it wings. Yet, to really soar, a poet needs to take off from the ground.
 
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Everyday Canvas
"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself."
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
David Whyte
This is my supplementary blog in which I will post entries written for prompts.
December 22, 2014 at 3:55am December 22, 2014 at 3:55am
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Prompt: In what ways do you think reading literature enhances your outlook on life?
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The question of what reading does for the human soul is an old one, almost as old as the time when the human beings discovered writing. From then on, the value of reading literature has become enormous as is expands empathy and mental powers and ennobles the inner life, providing the readers with a simulation of real life, while informing and entertaining them.
For me literature is more than entertainment. It is therapy; it is schooling; it is a response to the human fallibility. It helps us live and die with a bit more rationality, understanding, wisdom, and appreciation of life. It allows us to consider events from someone else's point of view and shows us the results of our actions on people in a way we wouldn't grasp otherwise. As Emerson said, "In the works of great writers, we find our own neglected thoughts."
Reading literature is a cure for loneliness. Writers of great literature open our hearts and minds to ourselves and show us who or what we are, so we can travel through our experiences without feeling so abandoned, as sometimes we are reluctant or unable to say or even admit to ourselves what's really on our minds or what it is that is facing us.
Reading literature helps us to become nicer as it is opposed to the main value system of the society, which rewards power and money. Great stories and poetry make us more concerned and appreciative of important ideas and feelings that are not cynical, commercial, or status-oriented. They give us examples of kind, generous, lovable people to emulate, in contrast to the more negative materialistic ones.
Reading literature prepares us for success and failure. Through what we read, we learn not to judge harshly our own failures and not to gloat over our little successes. It gives access to a wide range of emotions and events and lets us peek into numerous situations that we wouldn't have time to experience in one lifetime. In this way, reading literature is a time-expender. It is as if we live many lifetimes in just one lifetime.
In short, the great books that we read serve as tools by letting us live our lives with more sanity, goodness, understanding, and wisdom.
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