Reading to Become, Reading to Be: Beyond Ruskin and Proust

A boy and a book at the edge of a river

Proust remembered reading as a child near a river, the afternoon light moving across the page while the world beyond the garden wall went about its business without him. He was not improving himself. He was doing something stranger: becoming more fully himself by passing through someone else's words. The sensation, he wrote later, was of contact with a depth he could not have reached alone.

Flora Champy's essay in Aeon, 'Does Reading Do Us Any Good?', uses this Proustian memory as a pivot point in a careful argument. Against Ruskin's moralism and the contemporary culture wars that have conscripted literature into ideology from both directions, she argues that reading's real gift is neither moral betterment nor empathy training. It is what Proust called ethical formation: the expansion of the self through contact with another's creative interiority. Champy earns this through a sweep of intellectual history taking in Barthes, Derrida, Harold Bloom, and the current wars over the canon. She is right that neither side of the contemporary debate gets reading quite right. But she stops one step short of the synthesis her own argument is pointing toward.

Ruskin's wager and its limits

Ruskin's case for literature is essentially acquisitive. Books are a storehouse of the best minds across history, available to any reader who approaches them seriously. Reading is moral and civic training: it cultivates disinterestedness, sharpens attention, and makes better citizens. The benefit flows from the quality of what is read and the seriousness with which it is read. Go to books to get something valuable that you could not produce yourself.

The great-books tradition, whatever its fashionable critics say, rests on a genuine pedagogical insight: a young person who has read Thucydides on the plague in Athens, or George Eliot on the slow corruption of self-regard, has been handed something that direct experience alone rarely delivers in time. The discipline of sustained attention to a difficult text — staying with a paragraph that resists you, following an argument to its consequence — trains the mind in ways that shape moral perception. Ruskin understood that formation requires encounter with excellence, and that not all books are equally suited to the task.

Proust's wager and its danger

Proust's counter-claim, taken up by Champy, is more radical. Books are not a source of wisdom to be extracted but a medium through which the reader's own deepest self is activated. The miracle of reading is not that great writers reveal their admirable minds to you — it is that contact with a writer's creative interiority opens something in you that you could not have reached alone. Crucially, Proust notes that the quality of the book barely matters: a mediocre writer can serve this purpose just as well, because what counts is the contact itself, not the content delivered. Reading is not acquisition but encounter — and what is encountered is finally yourself, at a depth ordinarily inaccessible.

The danger in this account is not difficult to name. If the quality of the book barely matters, if what counts is the contact that activates the reader's own depths, then the reading self risks becoming the only real subject of the exercise. The self expands, discovers new dimensions of experience, grows more capacious and more sensitive — and then turns all that capacity inward, toward its own enrichment. Balthasar traced this movement in his early work on the German literary tradition: the aestheticized self, unchecked by love that moves outward, curves back on itself. The deepening becomes a spiral.[^4] This is the aesthete's temptation — to mistake self-expansion for self-transcendence.

The history of the twentieth century offers uncomfortable illustrations. Albert Speer read widely, cultivated a sophisticated appreciation of classical form, and used every ounce of that cultivation to design the stage sets of genocide. An expanded self is not necessarily a better-directed one.

The synthesis Champy's essay is reaching toward

For Ruskin, you read to become better. For Proust, you read to become more fully yourself. Ruskin's reader is a student; Proust's reader is someone undergoing a strange kind of self-discovery that requires another person's words as the occasion but not as the source.

The resolution is not to retreat from Proust. It is to recognize that each account is a partial truth that requires the other to function.

Ruskin's disciplined attention to excellent books is the right prescription for early formation. The young reader who has not yet developed the habits of sustained attention, who has not been trained in the difference between what merely gratifies and what genuinely enlarges, needs the guidance that a carefully selected canon provides. Taste must be educated before it can be trusted. The great-books tradition, at its best, is not an exercise in cultural conservatism but a training regime: it gives the reading mind enough contact with genuine excellence that it begins to recognize the difference between depth and its simulation. You cannot open yourself to all of literature from the start, because without some prior formation you cannot distinguish encounter from flattery.

But Ruskin's framework, adopted in isolation, produces a reader who is always a student — always going to books to acquire something — and never quite arrives at what Proust describes: the moment when a sentence stops you, not because it contains information you needed, but because it has reached a part of you that you did not know was there. That experience is real, and it is the most important thing literature does. The reader who has been formed by Ruskin's discipline and then encounters a writer from outside the canon — an unexpected voice, a minor novelist, a poet working in a tradition they never studied — can bring the quality of attention their formation developed to a text that a Ruskian curriculum may have excluded.

The goal of reading is not sophistication. It is not even the self-discovery Proust describes. It is encounter with and expansion by the Truth — and truth, as Balthasar insists, arrives in form, through beauty, from a depth that always exceeds the page.

Ruskin builds the reader. Proust frees them. Neither is sufficient.

[^1]: David Schindler, 'Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work', p. 62: 'he was really a professional scholar of German literature and not a theologian.'

[^2]: 'La mistica del amor: Balthasar, Spyer de Birot, ch. 5': 'l'enjeu primordial, pour l'homme, va être la perception.'

[^3]: 'An Introduction to Von Balthasar's The Glory of God', p. 8: 'it translates itself into something seen.'

[^4]: 'La mistica del amor: Balthasar, Spyer III de Birot, ch. 6': 'une christologie de la Mission et de l'Amour kénotique.'