Sound familiar, Torrey students?
As I was struggling through Brothers Karamozov today with the sort of low concentration levels that usually only come with lack of sleep and a distracting roommate, I started wondering why we read. At all. What's the point of spending 30-40 hours on a book? (Somewhere in there is the time it took me to finish Anna Karenina.) Ironically, the answer to my question came from the very book that caused me to wonder.
" ...young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices in many cases, while to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed they loved and set out to accomplish - such sacrifice is quite often almost beyond the strength of many of them."
The sacrifice of time and energy that my reading requires is often almost beyond my strength. But I have always kept at it, because I knew it was important somehow. But why? I realized after reading the passage above: we read that we might better serve the truth. For all people, Christian or otherwise, their goal should be to learn, understand, and apply the truth to their life.
There is so much more to this quest for the truth, but for the moment I offer it simply as the answer to why we read. We read to seek the truth, and we read what we read because it is the best way to find the truth.
Yes! Education is about willingly doing what is hard...but why the heck would we want to do that? Because it is through working hard that we learn about truth on so many levels. (I don't think this is particularly what you were getting at, but I think it is an aspect of it.)
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