The point is, it doesn’t matter what you read, what matters ...

The point is, it doesn’t matter what you read, what matters is how you read it. Now, I don’t mean comic books, but there’s a lot of cultural wealth out there from all over the place, and to learn what it means for something to be culturally rich, you can explore almost anywhere: there’s no fixed subset that is the basis of truth and understanding. I mean, you can read the “Good Books,” and memorize what they said, and forget them a week later—if it doesn’t mean anything to you personally, you’d might as well not have read them. And it’s very hard to know what’s going to mean something to different people. But there’s plenty of exciting literature around in the world, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that unless you’ve read the Greeks and Dante and so on, you’ve missed things—I mean, yeah, you’ve missed things, but you’ve also missed things if you haven’t learned something about other cultural traditions too.

www.joshbeckman.org/notes/484762161