Michael Xu (IV CR MRG) 4EN101-RELWhy Study Literature?

As a person who is and always has been hopeless at any scientific subject, I suppose that I never had any choice but to specialise in literature and the humanities in general. From the day I was born, my parents still tell people the story of how I knew the whole English alphabet when I could barely count to three. They told this anecdote in quiet, bashful tones; Chinese-born people like my parents are of the firm belief that the sciences are the most important subjects of all. A famous Chinese saying still rings in my head to this day. The day after I won the Farrar Prize for English back in the old glory days of Second Form, my father, conspicuously unimpressed, had whispered into my ear: “Learn maths, physics and chemistry well, and you are going to walk this planet without fear.” The omission of any of the humanities in that list still worries me, but I am of the fatalist opinion that I will never be able to do anything about it. Might as well make the best of what few skills I have.

Yet even as I think of it now, there is certainly something wrong in that kind of logic. Surely literature is essential, or even more essential than something like one of the sciences. Literature was around earlier than mathematics… one of the oldest civilizations in the world, the Ancient Egyptians, knew how to write letters and read before they could learn to count. If anything, that is a clear indication of the importance of literature: it seems to be in our quintessential human nature to read or create literature.

Without literature, it would not be drawing a long bow to say that our methods of communication would merely extend to making ape-like incoherent sounds towards our fellow species, and we would not have the rich vein of history which we have right now.

Yet let us leave practicalities for a moment while we move to the point that literature is without doubt a much more enjoyable thing to study. Most modern day people enjoy activities such as reading a book or watching a film or listening to a song, all of which are to do with this beautiful thing called literature. Going deeper into these activities, such as analysing a book for its meaning, stripping a film to see its techniques and repeating a song so that you can know more about a singer are all things to do with studying literature. We all count them as a basic part of life, yet some of us still foolishly believe that studying literature is not essential.

A valuable life lesson is taught by literature as well. All too often humans tend to oversimplify matters and over categorize. We tend to try and make everything fit into a certain category which we set for it, and we believe that anything that doesn’t fit simply does not belong in society. To rephrase what must have been a confusing explanation, we tend to oversimplify the world into a solid black and a solid white with no vague shades in between. That’s certainly understandable: it makes our lives

so much more simplistic. Subjects such as mathematics and chemistry, for example, work on that same logic: everything has one correct answer and either you are correct or you are incorrect. Yet is life truly like that? Literature shows us otherwise. It shows us indeed there can be a thing which does not belong and seemingly never will. It shows through numerous anecdotes and words that sometimes there is no right or wrong answer to everything, there are simply good or bad answers. If anything, that is a much more accurate representation of life, and this representation can only be garnered through literature. Studying literature goes deeper into this basic logic and asks us and incites more specific questions: for example Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World might incite a question of “How much technology is too much?” or “Will machines take over the world?”

The incitement of thought is one of the main harbingers of progress in our society, and once again it is literature that brings out the vital questions that need to be answered. Even scientists themselves understand the importance of literature: most like Leonardo Da Vinci and Galileo Galilei among others used the platform of literature to express and explain their history-changing ideas. Without such a platform to express these ideas, and without people studying literature to truly understand these ideas, perhaps life would be much more primitive and rudimentary. Literature is something which is intrinsic in every single one of our human natures and studying it is yielding to that desire within us. It is because of that desire that we study literature in our world.