82. On the Importance of Imagination

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.”

    -Percy Bysshe Shelley

This is one reason to read great literature, or so I tell my students.  Literature isn’t going to make us better people necessarily, but exercising our imaginations by entering empathetically into the lives of characters, feeling their pains and pleasures, can be a good “Christian” practice.  It prepares us to do the same thing in real life.  But reading a lot of imaginative literature doesn’t guarantee that we will do what Shelley recommends when it matters most (in real life) or that we will respond with the appropriate and loving actions even if we do manage to use our imaginations empathetically.

Still, I suspect that–like the person who regularly practices anything–the person who regularly exercises the imagination in this way has a better chance of becoming more actively compassionate than the person who doesn’t bother with the practice.