Allow me to begin with an update on my own reading life. Right now I'm somewhere in the middle of a brand-new book of literature scholarship, Reading for Our Time by J. Hillis Miller. The main subject of Reading for Our Time is English novelist George Eliot. So why am I talking about this on a literature in translation blog? Well, because some of the points that Miller makes about Eliot's huge novels are just as relevant to the huge novels of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Proust. Please, trust me on this one.
As Miller asks, can reading large novels today "be at all justified, in this time of irreversible global climate change, worldwide financial meltdown, with a new financial bubble already bursting, and the bamboozling of the American electorate?" Even though you may not be a left-leaning university professor like Miller, you probably won't deny that we live in a time of considerable political and economic uncertainty. So why spend hours upon hours reading War and Peace when you could go out and make a difference?
Well, Miller has two justifications for reading big novels. First of all, such reading might be a "good in itself," a source of pleasure and comfort. But second of all, such reading can expand your understanding of human nature--and better equip you to go out and "make a difference" anyway. If you understand, for instance, why Proust's characters make wrongheaded decisions, you just might figure out how to avoid their interpretive mistakes.
To your mind, which of these is the better justification for reading long novels? Escape, or self-improvement? Or can you think of another good reason to read Proust, or Tolstoy, or Eliot, in spite of the tumult of current events?