On Losing Yourself (and Finding Yourself) in a Good Book

(image source)

In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are.  The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself.  The seconday impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness.  In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this.  Obviously this process can be described either as enlargement or as temporary annihilation of the self.  But that is an old paradox; "he that loseth his life shall save it." 

_______________________________

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.  There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege.  In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality.  But in reading great literature, I become a thousand men and remain myself.  Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.  Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. 

--C.S. Lewis, from An Experiment in Criticism