G. K. Chesterton once said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.” We see some things so often, that we never really look at them, and so miss out on appreciating the marvels all around us. We live in a world of immortal beings, and we do not often treat them as such. Our senses are vitiated, and we grow tired of seeing things as they ought to be seen. We smile indulgently at a child amazed by a magnet, and yet the child is closer to the truth than we. He that would enter the kingdom of heaven must become as a little child, and much the same thing is required of the person who would enter the kingdom of earth.
This habit of undervaluing all things is, I think, very much like telling a lie. We often live as though we have weighed the world, and found the stars wanting and our fellow men not much worth our valuable time (perilously close to the sin of bearing false witness against our neighbors). But we have probably never given them the benefit of a perceptive, second look. We are often quite like the Pharisees whose ears were dull of hearing and their eyes closed, so that they could not see God in their midst.
And this is where Dr. Hake says one of the values of literature lies. “[B]ecause literature is concrete and appeals to our senses, literature can help wake up our senses. It can help us to really look at and see the things around us. It can help us to really listen and hear, smell, taste and touch.”
“If you look at a thing 999 times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it for the 1000th time, you are in danger of seeing it for the first time,” Chesterton said, and we may well say that this is what happens to us when we read an Emily Dickinson poem and for the first time “watch a beetle pass.” Good literature helps us to reach that 1000th glance at something which we finally begin to see. I dare anyone to read The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and not come to appreciate, in “Trespassers W,” something as simple as a broken sign. I hope there is no being so depraved that reading Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop does not, for one moment at least, cause him to look up and see the astonishing Dick Swivellers and Marchionesses that surround him in “ordinary” people. Literature renews us, and if indeed it should happen that a book would cause us to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and understand with our hearts, it might be that we would be converted and healed.
(Originally posted by me in my Western Lit. I class.)
