So, first off, it was really boring. Whoever wrote this thing has absolutely no idea how to grab an audience’s attention, at least, in my opinion. It kept throwing the work ‘Laureate’ at me and I still have no idea what it means.
Moving on, it’s an interesting idea. I completely agree with the idea of literature forming bonds across time, space, and giving people tools to care about each other. I think that reading can easily help people learn empathy, especially when they’re reading about other cultures or fiction, at least, that’s how I learned most of my empathy skills. A book can allow you to see into someone’s very being, experience what they’ve experience, learn what they have learned. It doesn’t matter if the person is long since dead, you can still connect with them. The paper even mentions something very similar to how I think, “You know, we read novels for pleasure, and in those novels we are being observersーor even sometimes, it feels like, a participantーin the lives of people who are unlike us in so many ways, even when they’re like usーwhere we’re going to different geographies, different periods in time, we’re watching people make all these choices and mistakes, and we’re invested in that.” And for once, I completely agree with someone in a school paper. I have actually thought of something very similar to this before and I love that I’m not the only one.
Muffin; The Blog 