Free Why Read? by Mark Edmundson

perception,
changed for the better—through encounter with Jesus and his much-mediated word.
    The test of an interpretation is not whether it is right or perfect, but whether it leads us to a worldview that is potentially
better than what we currently hold. The gold standard is not epistemological perfection. The gold standard is the standard
of use.
    Wordsworth's Truth
    WHAT DOES IT mean to ask of a poem if it is true? What are we taking a poem—or any work of human intellect and imagination—to
be, if it is potentially a source of truth? Why don't we follow Kant, and all the idealists before and after him, in seeing
art as purely disinterested? Why are we unable to concur with Sir Philip Sidney in his oft-cited view that the poet "nothing
affirms and therefore never lieth"? Why not artistic purity? Why not art as purposiveness without any specific purpose?
    What I am asking when I ask of a major work (for only major works will sustain this question) whether it is true is quite
simply this: Can you live it? Can you put it into action? Can you speak—or adapt—the language of this work, use it to talk
to both yourself and others so as to live better? Is this work desirable as a source of belief? Or at the very least, can
it influence your existing beliefs in consequential ways? Can it make a difference?
    Let us say that the work at hand is Wordsworth's "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of
the Wye During a Tour. July 13, 1798." The poem—it is anything but accidental—takes place not far away from a ruined abbey.
In the midst of the ruins of religion—or the ruins of conventional religious prospects for him—Wordsworth finds himself forced to compound a new faith. This faith will not be based on preexisting
scripture; it will not be a faith received from others. Wordsworth, spurred on by his return to a scene that was at the center
of his childhood, will gather to himself those memories that give him the power to go on living and go on writing.
    The world as Wordsworth has lately experienced it is stale, flat, and profitless. He lives in a din-filled city, among unfeeling
people—and, worse yet, he senses that he is becoming one of them. He thinks of himself as abiding "In darkness and amid the
many shapes / Of joyless daylight." Time upon time, he says, "the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
/ Have hung upon the beatings of my heart." There is a dull ache settling into his spirit, one that the eighteenth century
would have called melancholy and we would now call depression. But rather than relying on religious consolation, as Dr. Johnson
tried to do when he battled his own terrible despondency, or on drugs, as Wordsworth's dear friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge
did, Wordsworth relies on himself. Laudanum, predecessor of today's antidepressant drugs, the serotonin reuptake inhibitors,
and Coleridge's preferred source of solace, is not what's wanted. The poet will find consolation in himself or not at all.
    And why should he not be disconsolate? For how can one bear life in its manifold sorrows, with all of its horrible sufferings,
the sufferings of children and the innocent preeminent among them (think of the horrors unfolding in the world as you read
this page, as I write it) and not go mad? Virtually all of us are bound to suffer as well—"pain of heart, distress, and poverty,"
if not of one sort then of another, to use Wordsworth's phrasing from "Resolution and Independence." But what seems to trouble
Wordsworth most is that amidst this commonality of suffering, we still treat one another with rank callousness, with "greetings
where no kindness is," "rash judgments," "sneers." Without the figure of a loving (or at least a just) God presiding over
the world, ready at some point to dispense rewards to the worthy, and punishment or correction to the erring, it is no easy
matter to find a reason not to despair. Where is Wordsworth, who seems devoid of religious