As a person who is interested in literature more than in her whole existence, a question always comes to mind: “Can I imagine my life without literature in it?” I get uncomfortably scared whenever this thought comes up. A life without literature is a life without meaning to me.
The idea of literature came to mind on a very random day while messing around my grandfather’s study table, holding his works and books. At that moment, it felt very wrong to do that, but today, when I think about it, I feel very glad that I committed that crime. He may not know this, but he is the one who influenced me to choose literature as my subject. I can agree that maybe at that time I was just a stupid girl who had no interest in reading books, stories or poems. But at this point in my life, my only goal is to read as many books, stories, poems and understand as many works as I can.
Not only do I think about my life with no literature in it, but I sometimes wonder about those who think that literature is no longer popular for us, or it’s just a waste of time, or it’s boring to read. I can agree that it’s kind of difficult and hard to understand when you first read it, but if you try to truly understand it with every single beat of your heart and flow with it like the flowing water of a river, you will realize how meaningful and amazing each work is.
Any work by any literary individual has some reason and message hidden behind it; we just must truly understand it, not from our brain but from the heart.
They say that literature is no longer popular among people now, that it was more respected and valued in the old times, which is completely wrong. Literature is the core and can never be forgotten. Yes, it was more respected and valued in the old times because back then, people valued and gave respect to things that were deserving of it. They say that literature is boring; do they even know how vast it actually is? No matter how knowledgeable you get, it’s still never enough.
Lately is have seen on social media that people are using quotes said by famous literary personalities. I mean, that’s not a very big deal, obviously. The irony is that they are the same people who called literature boring. Writers like Franz Kafka, Dostoevsky, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde were really trending on Instagram recently. People are making content about them without even doing a proper study of them. Some compare themselves to the character of ‘Raskolnikov’ from Crime and Punishment, while others say they are similar to the character of ‘Samsa’ from The Metamorphosis, which sounds dumb and idiotic, without knowing the whole context. How can you compare yourself to a specific character?
At first, I also laughed at those, but when I realized that it’s actually wrong and disrespectful, it made me very pissed.
How can you make jokes about someone’s feelings that they expressed through their works?. How can you make fun of Sylvia Plath’s attempt at suicide and call it hilarious?. How can you call the transformation of Samsa into a bug illogical without knowing the reason behind it?. How can you compare your love to the love of the protagonist for Nastenka in White Nights?. They claim that their favourite movie is ‘Dead Poets Society’ and they dare to get on the table and shout “O Captain! My Captain!” without knowing that it’s a poem by Walt Whitman.
There is a statement by E. M. Forster: “What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote”, what a powerful statement. The one who reads a summary of the works uses AI to get to know the works would never relate to them. To understand any work, first we have to understand the one who wrote it, what their life and personality were like. Only in that way can we actually understand the feeling they are expressing, what their thoughts are, and what they actually felt while writing. Without doing a proper study, we are no one to object or make any comment on any work of literature.
I would love to have a conversation with the one who is capable of considering literature boring, without knowing about the romance written by Jane Austen, the tragedies written by Shakespeare, the moral reflection of society by Leo Tolstoy, the redemption of Dante, and the irony represented by Oscar Wilde in his work, The Picture of Dorian Grey.
Not only in prose, but in poetry, the praise of nature by John Keats, the idea of isolation given by Edgar Allen Poe in his poem ‘Alone’, the harsh reality expressed by Ella Wheeler Wilcox in the poem ‘Solitude’, the concept of the afterlife shared by William Blake and many more endless things are represented by many literary figures.
Literary works are just words written on pages; they are the feelings of someone’s heart; they are the thoughts of someone’s mind. Every single drop of the ink has emotion-filled in it. Those emotions are just meant to read, but to be understood, accepted and praised. We must understand them from the bottom of our hearts and value them till our last breath.
As I end this, all I have to say is that if linguistics is the body of a language, then literature is the heart of it, which sometimes gives it life.
About the Author
This article was selected as part of the submissions for the LIB Literature Festival 2026, organized by the LIB Literary Chapter in association with The Literary Mirror, under the esteemed patronage and mentorship of IPS Vikas Vaibhav and the able leadership of Jyoti Jha.
The poem has been authored by Arham Imam, who is currently pursuing her M.A. in English at Patna Women’s College.
