Michael Harris, «Solitude: In Pursuit of A Singular Life in a Crowded World»:

Keith Oatley glances out the window and says, “Reading is very different from our day-to-day life, isn’t it?” 

This seems a little obvious, and for a few seconds I worry he’ll stop there. But then he clicks onward, tapping one hand in the palm of the other. “When we read, we can become people who we are not. A metaphorical process occurs. One’s self becomes Elizabeth Bennet or Anna Karenina. One becomes a fictional protagonist. We can live more lives than our own.” If Woolf had been able to speak from that copy of Three Guineas on the table, she might have chimed in with something she once wrote in a letter to Ethel Smyth: “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego.” 

People talk about getting “lost” in books, and I suppose this is what they mean—that the fortress we build around ourselves, the pretense of a single “self” that protects us as we shuffle through our days, begins to crumble ten pages into a good novel, letting a new voice, a new identity, wash over us.

When I read Nabokov’s Lolita and spend a few days taking on the voice of a pedophile and murderer, or when I read Wharton’s The House of Mirth and get some glimpse of what it means to be a woman enduring the limitations of a misogynist society, these are gifts of experience. But those gifts can be received only when I quiet myself, calm my otherwise feverish ego. 

This process—the solitary giving over of the mind—is something that readers train themselves to do over the course of years. But eventually they develop a talent for it, and then they begin to nurture something that we need much more of—empathy. The constant reader, says Oatley, learns to hold opinions and ideas that are not their own. We become primed not just to discover new thoughts but to live them, absorb them, care about them. Others, like York University psychologist Raymond Mar, have done the MRI scans to back Oatley up. 

The parts of the brain that are involved in reading fiction in particular share large areas with the parts of the brain that help us understand other people in daily life. When we read, our brains behave as though we are experiencing what the hero experiences. The solitary reader rehearses the lives of others. And I think that must be the definition of empathy—to rehearse the lives of others.

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