If you don’t have time to read books of your choosing anymore, I’m willing to believe that there’s probably a damn good reason.

Forgive me for not listing all of the familiar causes of any given Blue Devil’s free time deficit. We talk about our responsibilities and pet distractions plenty as it is, whether or not I add my two cents to an already overflowing jar.

So I’ll leave the “why” alone: I don’t know exactly why you believe that you don’t have time to read for pleasure, but I’m sympathetic. Anyway, why exactly is reading on your own terms and for your own reasons important enough for you to carve time out for it in your day, week, semester?

Let me start by saying that few things are as bullshitted about as literature (which is admittedly just one kind of worthwhile reading, but work with me). Half-baked phrases like “elucidate deeper truths” and “touch the human soul” are commonplace in discussions about the “importance of literature in society.”

To be completely honest with you, I don’t think literature is necessarily all that important.

It’s true that I enjoy a good read, particularly the fictional, literary kind. It’s partly an affectation, partly how I was raised and partly just me. And though I’m an English major, part of me wishes that I had been born an engineer.

That latent insecurity—wishing I were an engineer but knowing that my heart is with books—has to do with what I’ll call the “Dark Knight problem.”

You may remember when Commissioner Gordon tells his little son that Batman is not the hero Gotham “needs,” but the one it “deserves.” It’s the same way with literature: the world doesn’t need novels, it deserves them.

Good literature wouldn’t be created in a perfect world. A story needs conflict—things like disagreement, violence, anguish, lost left socks. To be really good, a story must somehow capture (this is the tricky, mysterious bit) the spirit of a few of the million conflicts we witness and deal with here in the real, imperfect world.

Not all stories are tragedies, just as not all of our conflicts are tragic; they can be heroic, comic, absurd. But conflict exists, and we’ve always felt the need to tell real and imagined stories about it—some of it earns the fairly arbitrary honorific “literature.”

Writing or reading literature isn’t “inherently” important in my eyes because I can’t make the same kind of case for its existence as I can for the existence of such activities as farming, building bridges or practicing medicine: utopia or no, these are fundamental things that “sustain life.” All of that business keeps us alive in such a way that we can all at least think about leading uncomplicated—and happily literature-free (no more Crime and [you better believe it] Punishment)—lives, even if we inevitably end up not doing so.

 Ideally, there would be no literature for me to care about and study. I would just go on with my sedate life and learn how to build bridges. It’d be like “Brave New World” without the mind control drugs, and I’d be all happy and sexed-up.

But we live here in the real, Gothic world. True, there aren’t quite as many psychopaths running amok on this campus as there were in Batman’s Gotham. Which is good; as long as we can avoid murderous rococo clowns, we’ve got a shot at getting some good reading done.

Why read on your own in college?

I’d like to suggest that you take a few moments away from wrestling with real conflicts—existential angst, too much work and not enough time to read, anarchist clowns. Consider giving a good read the chance to do what books do best: capture conflict. Capture conflict, make it momentarily hypothetical even if it’s no less poignant, call it by name and in so doing steal some of its thunder.

You should read because you think you shouldn’t and say you can’t. Literature doesn’t just depict the struggle of real life: the stimulating peace of reading is a shelter from real conflict. When life is poisonous (or maybe just busy), literature is the antidote.

You probably have a damn good reason that it’s a bother to go read. But, if you have gotten or ever hope to get something beautiful and sheltering from a book, a good read is not only the indulgence you need, but the small rebellion you deserve.

Connor Southard is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs every Monday.