Thursday Thoughts...

“Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of one's own"

Arthur Schopenhauer 

This is such a good way to think about the gifts that reading brings.  Through reading a newspaper, a zine, a novel, a memoir, a history or a text book; we are given the opportunity to see how somebody else thinks.

We get a different take on the world; we see things through other people's eyes.

I wonder if there is any link between reading and empathy?  If we read are we more likely to be able to empathise; to understand another's view point?

I guess it depends on a lot of things, but I am sure that reading would be a contributor to empathy. Unless of course we only read things that supported our own opinions and biases!

You know, like the algorithms that feed us information we are interested in and send the other things in a different direction.

I am so often grateful to a writer or author who has written things I would never have known or thought of by myself.

I never knew anything about this - before the movie. Then I got the book. Always a different thing; but what an important story to tell.